We are honoured and grateful that the Swiss Medical Weekly proposal has been accepted under the Swissuniversities program “Open Science Program 2021-2024” and was supported by the Medical Faculty of the University of Basel through a “matching fund”. The project is based on the following elements:
A sustainable open-access platform for clinical medicine and biomedical sciences
To sustain and improve the Platinum open-access journal Swiss Medical Weekly, and to strengthen OA medical publishing in Switzerland and internationally, we proposed three complementing working packages:
(A) The development of a sustainable, multichannel OA information platform consisting of (i) a new OA website for the SMW, (ii) implementing and integrating an OA preprint server for medical articles based on the Open Preprint Systems initiative and (iii) setting up new OA information channels via social media to inform about latest (bio-)medical research in Switzerland.
(B) The development of a sustainable and scalable OA peer-review/publishing platform by moving our peer reviewing process from the currently used proprietary platform to the open source project Open Journal Systems (OJS) and active contribution to the development of OJS plugins.
(C) Further development of our sustainable OA workflows.
A key aspect of this project is its scalability. Due to the open-source nature of the platform, the planned networking, and freely accessible documentation, the project will also produce an output that smaller journals wishing to switch to platinum OA, or newly founded journals, can continue to use for themselves.