Transplant International Goes for GOLD!

Transplant International is starting the New Year with a new publisher. After a rigorous review process, Frontiers Partnerships was considered the best fit four our mission and was selected based on their high quality performance and their enthusiasm for active engagement in our journal (1,2). One key criterion was our determination to move to a Gold Open Access model. The publication of medical science in open access format has been growing over the past decade, on what is a seemingly irreversible path. Indeed, in 2020, the number of papers published in open access exceeded for the first time those accessible by subscription only (3). We believe that open access publication is part of the dynamic process of open research, which starts with the publication of research in preprint servers while the manuscript undergoes revisions and improvements, and ends with the granting of full access to source data, for the sake of transparency, reproducibility of experiments, and the fostering of more rigorous science. These considerations are embodied in the FAIR guiding principles for scientific data management - Findability, Accessibility, Interoperability, and Reusability- (4,5) to which Transplant International explicitly adheres.