Soon Medwave will conclude its volume 17. It has been 17 years since we issued our first number. A lot has happened since then. We started out as a journal that published full-text conference coverage of medical meetings, congresses and courses, and we ended up with what we are today – a peer-reviewed medical journal indexed in the main scholarly databases.

In all of these years, we have never stopped publishing, nor have we had interruptions of any sort. We have also been able to upgrade our publishing systems, twice renew our graphic interface, include new article functions, and improve our peer review process, among some of our important achievements. In addition, we have been able to consolidate a strong team of associate editors, of peer reviewers, of statistical and methodological reviewers, and of editorial board members. All of this has been possible in large part due to the voluntary and engaged contribution of many colleagues, but also with financial resources. In contrast to the abundant collaboration of so many health care professionals of the region, we have had to face a chronic scarcity of monetary resources sorely needed to cover the journal’s day-to-day operations, which include personnel, a roster of editorial and publishing costs, and the need for constant technological enhancements.

We have always been an open access journal, and we will continue to be open access. This is our commitment. To follow this course, I have personally made countless efforts in these last years to seek public funding, international funds, crowd-funding campaigns, and even national or international strategic alliances, in order to provide long-term sustainability to the journal. Regrettably, my efforts have failed repeatedly, as no support systems are available for this general biomedical journal.

We shall not institute a paywall in Medwave. This goes against everything we believe in – that knowledge has to be accessible to all those who need it, in a timely fashion. However, we have reached a point where, in order to be able to project ourselves to the next stage, which most surely means having an impact factor, we need fresh funds. Consequently, we will have to do what other open access journals in the world do: charge authors. Only this way our articles will be available to all.

We must uphold the excellence we have achieved up to now. We must continue publishing only high-quality articles with the highest publication ethics standards. We have set this groundwork in the region. To the extent that we are able to have an impact factor, we will be in an even better position to serve those who need us, including academics, investigators, clinicians and policy-makers.

See our new author processing charges policy here.