Open new possibilities in Transplantation Research

Providing new, reliable, rapid and fully open avenues for publishing transplantation research will only add to our ability to advance transplantation science and the care of transplant recipients. We believe that the advent of “open access publishing” brings a fresh perspective to publishing novel research; Transplantation Research aims to contribute to this niche by providing all the potential benefits that open access publishing has to offer. Among the advantages are speed of publication (published immediately upon acceptance), high visibility of your research (anyone with web access can read your article free of charge), and the provision of unlimited space for figures and extensive data sets (including video). With Transplantation Research, all articles will be rigorously peer reviewed by our outstanding global editorial board [2], and other ad hoc experts in the field. These combined values provided by open access publishing have been recognised by numerous societies [3,4], national authorities and institutions, many of which now cover publication costs that guarantee open public access [5]. For example, both of our own academic institutions are participants of BioMed Central open access publishing, covering all publication costs. In Germany, the primary scientific funding agency, the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG), supports open access publishing by offering also to fund publication costs. Similarly, the European Commission strongly and actively advocates open access publishing of results from their funded projects. These are unmistakeable signals that the time and technology has come to bring our research results to all researchers, regardless of their local library funding resources, and to the general public. Moreover, it is recognition that public funding supports most research and that the public should have open access to the work they are paying for [6]. Therefore, we have taken on the task of establishing the journal Transplantation Research to