Pediatric Rheumatology – a continuation of Pediatric Rheumatology Online Journal

Our mission is to further research, scholarship, and education in pediatric rheumatology throughout the world and thereby improve the care of children with arthritis and rheumatic diseases. We hope to speed the growth of pediatric rheumatology in every country. We believe that a dedicated pediatric rheumatology journal has a better opportunity to help develop our field than existing, predominantly adult rheumatology journals. The journal is independent and international and is purposefully free of direct association with any one institution, organization, or commercial enterprise other than BioMed Central.Our choice of the open access venue is intentional. We wish the pediatric rheumatology information in this journal to be freely available to anyone. We believe that this model is optimal for growth of pediatric rheumatology in both developed and developing countries [1,2]. Why is the online, open access venue preferable to the traditional subscription journals in rheumatology? First, all articles become freely and universally accessible online and so an author's work can be read by anyone at no cost. Articles, photos, figures, tables, and other components can be freely downloaded. Second, the authors, not the publishers, hold the copyright for their work and grant anyone the right to reproduce and disseminate the article, as long it is correctly cited and no errors introduced. Third, Pediatric Rheumatology's articles will be archived in PubMed Central, the US National Library of Medicine's full-text repository of life science literature. These articles will also be archived in the repositories at the University of Potsdam in Germany, at INIST in France, the e-Depot, the National Library of the Netherlands' digital archive of all electronic publications, and in the new UK PubMed.Why should we join the shift towards online, open access publishing? The traditional business model for scientific publishers requires restriction of access to published research so that the