In the last two decades the Open Access movement has imposed a revolution in the area of scientific publications. Most of scientific journals in the field of Basic Sciences and Medicine have gone online in the last 20 years or so. Internet has changed the way most of the journals publish their contents. Moreover, authors, editors, reviewers, and publishers have also seen their activities completely modified from paper-based documents to electronic files and other Internet utilities. A major asset of Internet is the possibility to wide-spread news and any sort of messages at an immediate speed.1–6
The Open Access movement started more than 20 years ago with the objective to make the contents published in the different scientific publications publicly available very soon, right after the manuscripts have been accepted by the editors of the journals. This movement has been progressively growing, with advantages and disadvantages as any other process in life. The biggest issue with open access publishing stems from the publication charges that apply due to maintenance of the journals’ web pages. Nonetheless, in many subscription-based journals, several items are not subsidized by the journals or the societies (e.g. color pictures) and the payment of those expenses is left to the authors as well. On the other hand, many scientists are in favor of publishing in Open Access journals as the results of their research can be made easily and rapidly available to the whole scientific community and interested readers have access to those contents without any restrictions. This also increases, theoretically, the possibility of getting a greater number of citations by interested authors as papers are made easily available very quickly.1–6
Furthermore, Internet and immediate access to information is part of the daily life of the youngsters in our societies. Generally speaking the younger generations of readers and authors are keen to using the new technologies, social media and networks compared to older scientists who still like using paper printed articles from time to time, or always. Young authors want to see their accepted papers published immediately. Moreover, nowadays there is a lot of pressure to get the results of the research published as soon as possible from the Universities (e.g. PhD theses) and funding agencies in order to monitor the use of the invested funds. In most of instances, these funds usually come from public or state agencies that need to justify the use of the money allocated to science to their citizenship. In addition, scientific and medical societies are also very keen in creating Open Access journals as part of their mission to their community members. In this regard, in the last few years, in most of the larger scientific and medical societies, we have all seen the transition from pure subscription-based to Open Access journals or part of it: hybrid ways in which the authors may decide whether the article should be published open. Besides, many of the scientific societies have also opted for the release of new Open Access journals, in which the scientific contents are published exclusively in this format and the research contents are made immediately available upon acceptance through Internet access to everybody.1–6
Open Respiratory Archives is a good example of this scenario. The Spanish Respiratory Society (SEPAR), which is allied with other international societies such as the European Respiratory Society (ERS) and the Latin American Thorax Association (ALAT), has also recently launched the journal Open Respiratory Archives, in which all the articles will be published exclusively in open access format. Elsevier will also edit this journal, in the same manner as with the subscription-based journal Archivos de Bronconeumología, also part of the SEPAR collection of publications. We hope that Open Respiratory Archives will be indexed in major international platforms within the next few years. We invite authors and readers to have a look at this Open Access journal of SEPAR. Guidance as to how to prepare the manuscripts for the different sections is provided in the journal's web page. We do hope that we all enjoy reading the contents of Open Respiratory Archives.
