OpenPhysio | Journal

Aims and scope

OpenPhysio is an open access, peer-reviewed academic journal with an emphasis on innovative approaches to teaching and learning in physiotherapy.  We accept papers that deal with the classroom, community and clinical contexts and encourage authors to take a critical perspective on physiotherapy education and share their ideas on different ways to think about teaching and learning. OpenPhysio is also a developmental journal, which means that our processes are designed to assist novice authors and peer reviewers present the best versions of their work, and we encourage contributions from anyone interested in improving physiotherapy education.

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Benefits of publishing your work in OpenPhysio.

• Immediate publication: Your article is available to the public soon after submission and before peer-review.
• Open peer review: Authors and named peer reviewers work together to improve the article.
• Transparent peer review: Peer reviews and author responses are published alongside the final article, providing transparency to the review process.
• Authors retain their intellectual property: All articles published on OpenPhysio are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license and the journal does not require a transfer of copyright.
• Open access: There are no access fees for readers and no page fees for authors. OpenPhysio is free to submit to and free to read.
• Articles are first class internet citizens: Your articles can be enhanced with images, audio, tagging, hyperlinks, and video.

OpenPhysio is not a traditional academic journal in the sense that we’re asking what a journal could be in the 21st century. Here are some of the benefits of publishing your work in OpenPhysio.

• Immediate publication: Your article is available to the public soon after submission and before peer-review.
• Open peer review: Authors and named peer reviewers work together to improve the article.
• Transparent peer review: Peer reviews and author responses are published alongside the final article, providing transparency to the review process.
• Authors retain their intellectual property: All articles published on OpenPhysio are licensed with a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license and the journal does not require a transfer of copyright.
• Open access: There are no access fees for readers and no page fees for authors. OpenPhysio is free to submit to and free to read.
• Articles are first class internet citizens: Your articles can be enhanced with images, audio, tagging, hyperlinks, and video.

OpenPhysio is an open access journal, making publications available for free to all members of the public, without needing to subscribe or pay membership fees. We believe in the principle of making research findings freely available to anyone with the means in order to support a greater global exchange of knowledge. Readers can download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full text of these articles, or use them for any other lawful, non-commercial purpose, without asking prior permission from the publisher or the author, as long as the author is credited with the creation of the original work.

We use the definition of open access provided by the Budapest Open Access Initiative:

By “open access” to [peer-reviewed research literature], we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself. The only constraint on reproduction and distribution, and the only role for copyright in this domain, should be to give authors control over the integrity of their work and the right to be properly acknowledged and cited.

Copyright

In addition to being available on OpenPhysio, authors are encouraged to post any version of their manuscript in their institutional repositories or on their personal websites at any stage of the pre- and post-publication process. As an open access journal, we do not require authors to transfer copyright to OpenPhysio in order to publish in the journal. Authors retain full control of their intellectual property and we use the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 license for all works published in the journal. This means that anyone is free to share this material in any medium or format, and that anyone can remix, transform, and build upon the content, as long as they provide attribution to the content creator.

OpenPhysio aims to provide prompt reviews that help authors ensure that published papers are rigorous and as good as they can be. All submissions are reviewed by someone on the Editorial Board, who check the submission for scope, fit, and quality before publishing the article. Submitted papers are then passed to an Associate Editor to begin the review process. Two reviewers are then invited to review the article.

Our review process is:

• Open: review reports are public and published alongside the final article
• Transparent: reviewers and authors are not anonymous.
• Collaborative: reviewers and authors are able to comment on each other’s work and we encourage an open dialogue between them.
• Ongoing: reviewers comment on the document prior to acceptance, and anyone can comment afterwards.

Reviewers work with authors and editors to improve the article by commenting on the public work. The aim of our peer review is to focus on the quality of the article and not its perceived importance. We trust that the relative importance of research is better determined by the community over an extended period, rather than by two anonymous reviewers at a single point in time. This means that an article is unlikely to be rejected based on the reviewers’ opinion of its “value”. However, rejection is still possible should the research include fatal flaws that cannot be addressed by the authors. Note that, while we encourage authors to engage constructively with the reviewers in improving the submission, the editorial team has the final say in deciding whether or not to accept the article.

Once the article is accepted, we encourage an ongoing, post-publication peer review process where readers can further engage with authors around the article. This process does not affect the “Accepted” status of the article but does allow for readers to discuss the research directly with the authors. The review process itself takes approximately 4 – 6 weeks to complete but can change depending on a variety of factors beyond our control at the journal.

This approach to peer review means that authors, reviewers and editors are accountable for the decisions they make, bias is reduced, novice reviewers can learn from the transparent process, and reviewers are acknowledged for their work. We believe that this approach creates an environment in which the ideas in scholarly work can be shared and discussed openly.