John Saxon, MD, and Brett Sperry, MD, are co-founders and editors in chief for OpenSource: Cardiology, a new journal they say will fill unmet needs in today’s medical journal landscape. While there’s no shortage of journals, they wanted to create a nonprofit open access model that’s free to submit original research and free for readers. Saxon, director of the Advanced Cardiac Valve Center at UVA Health, Charlottesville, Virginia, and Sperry, an advanced heart failure and transplant cardiologist at Saint Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute, Kansas City, Missouri, spoke with Medscape Medical News about the new journal and their vision for its future.

What is OpenSource: Cardiology?

Saxon: OpenSource: Cardiology is a peer-reviewed, open-access journal for the full spectrum of clinical and translational cardiovascular disease. We want it to be the most physician-friendly, scientist-friendly, and reviewer-friendly journal. We’re trying to do that through zero-cost publishing, AI-assisted workflows, and meaningful incentives for peer reviewers. The journal is designed to offer a friction-free submission process, efficient and rigorous reviews, and freely available science.

What sets OpenSource: Cardiology apart from other journals?

Sperry: There are a lot of other open access journals where you can read the papers not behind a paywall. But they usually come with a hefty price tag. The cost to publish is several thousand dollars while ours is free. [The founders say other aspects include being physician led and operated, a submission system built by scientist authors and editors, and AI review to improve manuscript quality and data integrity.]

Why did you decide to launch OpenSource: Cardiology?

Saxon: Throughout our careers, we’ve both felt how researchers do a ton of work to get published. We come up with ideas, find funding, execute the research, coordinate collaborators, and write papers — often during our personal or family time. In the traditional system, we also have to either pay money to publish or turn the copyright over to other entities. And the science is usually put behind a paywall so people around the world can’t read it, including patients and other physicians. When we spend so much time researching and writing papers, we want people to be able to read our work, engage with our findings, and hopefully use the research to change their practice.

Sperry: Our goal with OpenSource: Cardiology is to break down some of the barriers that are entrenched in the current system and create a publication where everything is open and free — for both scientists and consumers.

How are you turning this vision into reality?

Saxon: The idea of open access is not a new concept. But what’s really changed in the last year is that one of the main barriers to entry for medical publishing has gone away. It used to be that in order to publish a journal, you had to build a website and publishing tools. And that’s a high barrier to entry, especially for physicians who aren’t necessarily trained in programming or coding — and don’t have a lot of time because we’re busy seeing patients. But AI has dramatically changed things because it can help us build websites and publishing systems.

Sperry: We saw the opportunity to build a new publication because we were aware of AI’s capabilities and had some background in statistics and coding. It still took a huge amount of time to put together, but the barrier was way lower than it’s been. We were able to leverage AI to build everything we’d need to create an open-access publication and to streamline the publishing process.

What are your plans to fund this open access model?

Saxon: We’ve created a lean publishing model that we’ll fund through philanthropy, industry partnerships, and modest fees for nonoriginal research articles. We have organized this as a nonprofit 501(c)(3) corporation. The current costs to run an online-only journal are much lower than a legacy print journal. But there are still significant costs. We are working with industry and philanthropy to fund operations as well as compensation to the editorial team and reviewers who now provide largely uncompensated work in the current journal ecosystem. In the future, we may be able to generate some modest revenue on APCs for review articles and other formats, but our commitment is that we will never charge authors for primary research, and these papers will always be freely available to the public.

What can people expect from the submission process?

Saxon: A fast and easy experience with low barriers and rapid reviews. When we posted about OpenSource: Cardiology, it took the first author 9 minutes to submit their entire paper to us. We have AI mechanisms that help streamline the process so it will take minutes, not hours, to submit. We have an amazing team of editors, associate editors, and reviewers to ensure we’re publishing high-quality science and we’re offering incentives to facilitate rapid and rigorous reviews. And like other journals, we’re using AI to help perform a good, detailed, and nuanced review of your manuscript to improve the overall scientific research.

What are the primary challenges you face as a new journal?

Sperry: We know there are things that authors want through the publishing process, such as PubMed indexing, dissemination of research, and citations for their work. When you’re building a publication from scratch, those things can be a huge barrier to entry. For example, you can’t index with PubMed without a proven track record. So we know there’s a certain risk that authors will take before we’re an established publication.

The tradeoff is that we’ll promote every paper we publish like crazy. We will promote on social media with boosted posts, videos, and audio podcast summaries. Many journals do not promote at all, while higher-tier journals do tend to create a post about their new publications. So yes, you’re going to a journal that is unproven. But we will promote your research and ask colleagues to offer editorial comments so you get an immediate interpretation of your data and science.

When will the first issue come out?

Saxon: Probably September or October, depending on the cadence of submissions. And like other journals, it will be online first. As soon as your paper is accepted and passed through reviewers, that paper will be online within days.

What do you see as the future for OpenSource: Cardiology?

Saxon: We’re in the phase where there is an ecosystem designed for physicians and the question is how many people actually jump on board. We’ve gotten lots of support online and from other physicians. We workshopped the idea with leaders in the field. We’ve heard two things: One, “Awesome. Thank you. I’m glad you’re doing it.” And two, “This is going to be really hard.” So we’re expecting that it’s going to be challenging. But we believe we’re offering a great option to get rigorous science published quickly and affordably. And we hope people appreciate the values of this journal and decide to submit their science.

Saxon and Sperry reported having no disclosures.

Emily Halnon is a freelance writer who lives in Eugene, Oregon. She covers science, health, and endurance sports for many outlets.