Open access is an area of great debate among publishers and readers of scientific journals. Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine is greatly in favour of progress towards more open access to published material, as this would be in the interest of authors, readers and the whole scientific community. As stated on our homepage, open access is in line with the worldwide trend of attempting to provide greater access to the results of scientific research, as shown by the Berlin Declaration in 2003, and perhaps best expressed in the new rules for National Institutes of Health (NIH) and Wellcome Trust grant holders. For instance, the Wellcome Trust, the world’s largest research charity, now demands that the final manuscripts of all authors’ research papers are deposited in PubMed Central, the free-to-access life sciences repository developed by the National Library of Medicine. Papers deposited in this repository must be made freely accessible no later than 6 months after publication. Furthermore, many universities have proposed that recipients of their research grants should place a copy of the published journal articles in an e-print repository on university or subject-based websites. This is in line with the intentions of Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine and, in this way, the research papers will be exposed to greater potential audiences; anyone with internet access will be able to read them without restriction. By adhering to these regulations, we believe that we will also further increase the impact of the research published in our journal.

There are successive steps to be taken. Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine owned and published by a non-profit organization, the Foundation of Rehabilitation Information, and is presently dependent on subscription fees, as no commercial interests are involved and no major contribution is received from any other organization.

Our present policy to enable as open access as possible is:

• All authors may place their manuscripts submitted to Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine in the repository or homepage of their own institution or university.
• All authors may place a pdf file of their published article in the repository or homepage of their institution or university 6 months after publication of the electronic version of the paper in the journal.
• Open access is granted immediately on publication for reviews, newsletters from the organizations and some special reports.
• It is possible to obtain open access on publication at an extra cost to the authors.
• Open access is granted to all published articles 6 months after publication of the electronic version.

We also encourage authors to retain copyright of their work and instead sign a contract for license to publish with the journal.

Journal of Rehabilitation Medicine is a member of an international network on open access. Current debate on open access is followed carefully and in time we aim to move further towards this goal. We think that this will be an important step in distributing scientific information, not only to professionals but also to other members in the societies as to the general public.