10 Years of German Medical Science.

Editorial

The academic open access e-journal “German Medical Science” was founded in 2003 in cooperation between the German Scientific Medical Societies (AWMF), the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED), and the German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI). The driving forces for etablishing an academic open access e-journal were

the increasing costs of the conventional printed journals,

the limited international avaibalibity of the national journals,

the need for open access to the scientific publications,

the need for immediate publication,

the copyright of the authors.

Along with the first interdisciplinary e-journal other scientific medical societies transfered their printed journals to the electronic publishing procedure thus generating the academic portal “German Medical Science”.

All articles in “German Medical Science” are peer-reviewed, edited, and published online in open access. Additionally a wide number of congress proceedings and reports are published electronically.

The acceptance of the portal is documented by the high and increasing number of visits, presently more than 70,000 views per month.

In the first period the economic basis was given by the services of ZB MED and DIMDI and by funds of the German Research Foundation (DFG) and of the Federal Ministry of Health. Later the costs were partly covered by “publication charges” of the editing societies collected and managed in a non-profit organisation of the AWMF, ensuring together with the excellent services of ZB MED and DIMDI the operation and development of the portal. The journals are indexed in main literature databases – 7 journals also in MEDLINE/PubMed.

On the occasion of the 10th anniversary of “German Medical Science” the Board of the portal asked the Scientific Committee to vote on the best article published in “GMS German Medical Science – an Interdisciplinary Journal” in the past 10 years to be awarded as best paper. The article which got the highest number of votes was:

Gebbers, J.O.: Atherosclerosis, cholesterol, nutrition and statins, a critical review [1].

This article has been published in 2007. The Best Paper Award was presented to the author during a ceremony on August 22, 2013 (Figure 1 (Fig. 1)).

Figure 1

Prof. Gebbers (left) receives the Best Paper Award from Prof. Reinauer.

Beginning in 2014 the Best Paper Award will be granted annually.