The JACD Moves to Open Access By Michael Maihofer JACD Editorial Board
The Journal of the American College of Dentists (JACD) is pleased to announce that it will now be published on an open access digital platform. Our contract with ADA Commons, a digital repository and publishing platform managed by the American Dental Association, will help to ensure that JACD will now be accessible to an even greater worldwide audience. It will also allow for broader searchability through all common search engines used around the world, including those with a primarily scholarly focus such as Google Scholar and Elsevier’s Digital Commons Network. Publishing our scholarly work in this way will help facilitate increased understanding of, engagement with, and involvement in JACD’s mission of presenting proactive and informative perspectives on issues affecting the dental profession and society. Such an approach also has the potential both to inform and promote rich and diverse forms of public deliberation and to be enriched by them. While controversies surround the concept of open access publishing, concerning everything from predatory publishing and scholarly misconduct to lack of adequate digital preservation, rest assured the JACD will continue to adhere to the highest publication standards. JACD remains steadfast in its commitment to strict peer review through our own qualified volunteer reviewers employing a double-blind approach to avoid bias. Additionally, no author/contributor will ever pay any fees to publish any peer review accepted work in JACD. Our publication will bear all costs. Furthermore, we remain confident in the digital preservation strategy of ADA Commons. As one of the top priorities of any scholarly publisher, digital preservation ensures that content is safely stored and re-formatted as formats evolve. Like all legitimate scholarly publishers, ADA Commons contracts out their digital preservation to an established expert in the field. The backbone of ADA Commons is a product called Digital Commons by Elsevier. Digital Commons has been in existence for over 20 years and has a stellar reputation for maintaining servers, establishing redundancy, and following digital preservation standards in order that our content is safely stored, consistently accessible, and re-formatted as formats evolve. This will ensure that each issue of the Journal, going all the way back to 1934, will be available well beyond the foreseeable future.