OASIS (n. fertile place in the desert)

OASIS is a electronic platform for a series of Open Access journal titles. The OASIS Journal of Medical Research is a radically novel model of a peer-reviewed general medical research journal in the Internet age, entirely web-based and Open Access, managed by virtual communities of editorial committes and peer-reviewers.

Papers published in the OASIS Journal of Medical Research will be indexed in pertinent databases such as Medline and Pubmed Central. In fact, you will find no OASIS articles published on this site as all articles will be directly published in Pubmed Central, the U.S. National Library of Medicine's digital archive of life sciences journal literature, as well as in various Open Access archives. Publication in Pubmed Central guarantees preservation and widest possible dissemination.

The OASIS Journal will experiment with radically innovative peer-review and business models, mainly based on the idea that authors pay a nominal fee upon submission. This fee will partly be used to pay peer-reviewers to deliver a speedy and high quality peer-review. The OASIS Journal offers extremely speedy editorial decisions, which will be made by "just-in-time" ad-hoc editors. This means that there is no fixed editorial board, but just-in-time editors will be selected from a dynamic peer-reviewers database based on reputation/trust ratings. Reputation and trust management processes, based on peer-reatings and user feedback (similar to amazon, ebay, or epinions) as well as based on their number of publications (harvested from PubMed) are further essential features of the system.

The OASIS Journal of Medical Research relieves the author from the time-consuming "gamble" of submitting an article to a high impact journal, getting rejected, re-submitting it to a lower impact journal, getting rejected again, trying another journal, and so on.

OASIS J Med Res consists of a number of journal titles which are defined by quality rather than topic areas (as the articles are indexed they can be dynamically aggregated into topic-specific issues based on the preferences of the user). We think that in the age of bibliographic databases and Internet topic-specific journals are an anachronism. In practice, journal titles indicate the quality and likely impact of an article, and the decision in which journal an article is published in has often more to do with how important an article is. Therfore OASIS journal titles reflect the ratings given by the reviewers in respect to the importance of the results, measured for example by their anticipated impact factor (number of citations). Thus, OASIS J Med Res consists of the following journal titles:

• OASIS J Med Res A: publishes highly rated top research with very high anticipated impact, on par with papers published in journals such as NEJM, Nature, Science, JAMA. A paper published here is expected to be cited at least 10-20 times over the next 2 years.
  
• OASIS J Med Res B: important and innovative papers with high anticipated impact, e.g. on a "BMJ" level (anticipated impact factor around 4-6)
  
• OASIS J Med Res C: Research articles expected to be cited between 1-3 times over the course of two years (i.e. comparable with a good medical journal having a journal impact factor of 1-3)
  
• OASIS J Med Res D: Comparable with publication in a highly specialised journal or a BMC journal (anticipated impact factor around 1)