sfu.ca/about). Recently open access has been mandated by several major research funding bodies. The US National Institutes of Health, the Wellcome Trust, the UK Medical Research Council, and the Australian NHMRC all selleck kinase inhibitor now require that reports of research funded by these agencies are given open access within 12 months of the initial publication. There are compelling ethical arguments to inhibitors prefer open access publishing over traditional publishing models (Parker 2013), and there is evidence from a randomised trial that open access articles are much more widely read (Davis 2010). Now open access publishing has become well established in some areas of science. That is a good thing because it enables wide dissemination

of research findings to the clinicians and researchers and members of the general public who want to read about it. One major hurdle has so far prevented all core physiotherapy journals (Costa et al 2010) from instituting open access policies: someone has to pay, and in open access models that is usually the author. All major open access journals charge authors a fee to publish, and the fee is usually substantial. Publication fees present little problem when the research is supported by large grants, or by a pharmaceutical company, or by the producer of a medical device,

but they constitute a real impediment to publication for physiotherapy researchers, many of whom conduct their research with little or no funding support. If any of the existing physiotherapy journals was to charge a publication fee it would buy VRT752271 find that the number of manuscripts submitted for publication

dropped quickly. Consequently, while some non-core physiotherapy journals have embraced an open access model (www.doaj.org), and several core physiotherapy journals provide open access to content that is over one year old, none of the core physiotherapy journals (Costa et al 2010) has been made open access. The Board of Directors of the Australian the Physiotherapy Association has worked with the Editorial Board of Journal of Physiotherapy to create a new model of open access publishing in which (unlike in traditional publishing models) content is provided free to readers and (unlike existing open access models) publication is free to authors. The Association’s Board of Directors recognises that if its flagship journal is to be the world’s best physiotherapy journal it must exploit innovative publishing models. And the Association has embraced its role in providing the information infrastructure needed to support evidence-based practice. In this way the Australian Physiotherapy Association can build capacity in the physiotherapy profession in Australia, the region, and globally. The production and wide dissemination of a high quality journal is the ultimate demonstration to governments and health service providers that physiotherapy is a vibrant, research-based, scientific profession.