Open Access Publishing: experiences with the online-journal German Medical Science

GMS German Medical Science (http://www.egms.de) is a portal and international  interdisciplinary e-journal, which started with its first edition in July 2003. It is a co-production of the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany (AWMF), the German Institute for Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI) and the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED).
The AWMF is formed by 151 Learned Societies with 150.000 members from all fields of medicine. DIMDI offers more than 70 medical databases, information systems for drugs, medicinal products as well as health technology assessment and edits medical classifications in German. ZB MED, with its collection of more than 1.3 million volumes, is the largest medical library in Europe. Of its 18.000 journals, 7.800 are under current subscription.
The editorial board of GMS is provided by the AWMF, wh ile the ZB MED is responsible for the editorial work and for marketing. DIMDI guarantees the technical realization and provides permanent access and citeability of the electronic documents with the archival storage on its highly secure servers.
GMS offers open access to high-ranking and quality reviewed medical articles. It is aimed at all professionals in the field of medical science, health sciences and research and its intent is to propagate the high-quality research in medical science world-wide. All articles published in GMS are accessible immediately, permanently and free of charge for everyone in the world. Most articles are published in English after they were peer-reviewed by experts.
Besides interdisciplinary original and review articles GMS publishes the e-journals of individual member associations of the AWMF under their own titles with scientific original papers and surveys from each specific field. The portal additionally serves as a platform for public and internal communication a mong the member associations and for the publication of electronic proceedings.
It is an advantage for the authors to publish free of charge and keep the copyright. Furthermore, they can enrich their articles with high-resolution pictures, extensive charts, sounds, films, complete research databases or other data.
The maximum time span from submission to publication is 45 days.
In the start phase GMS is funded by the German Research Foundation (2002/3) and by the German Federal Ministry for Health (2004) for the production of a prototype. In the consolidation phase (2004/5) the German Research Foundation allocates funds for setting-up a business plan.
This business plan is designed to manage the relevant costs for IT (current and investments), production, management, rent and operations.