Do open access biomedical journals benefit smaller countries? The Slovenian experience

Abstract

Scientists from smaller countries have problems gaining visibility for their research. Does open access publishing provide a solution? Slovenia is a small country with around 5000 medical doctors, 1300 dentists and 1000 pharmacists. A search of Slovenia's Bibliographic database was carried out to identity all biomedical journals and those which are open access. Slovenia has 18 medical open access journals, but none has an impact factor and only 10 are indexed by Slovenian and international bibliographic databases. The visibility and quality of medical papers is poor. The solution might be to reduce the number of journals and encourage Slovenian scientists to publish their best articles in them.