MJA 2009: changing of the guard

The most notable event at the MJA this year for readers was the change in online access. In 1996, the MJA was made partially accessible online, and fully accessible in 2002, when our resources became sufficient to support this. Readers then enjoyed full open access to all MJA content until this year, when the company’s Board felt that it was not financially viable to continue this model and restricted full access to subscribers. Non-subscribers can, however, still access much of the Journal for free — research articles for the first 2 weeks following publication, selected articles free permanently and all articles free 12 months after their initial publication date. All online articles published before 2009 remain freely available. We will analyse the effect this restriction has had on our readership once we have more data, but interim indications are that our hit rates have not changed significantly. Many of our readers can access the Journal online via their institution’s subscription, and published contributors and reviewers receive a year’s free subscription.