16 years of “Medical Library Forum”. From Johannes Gutenberg to Open Journal Systems

Abstract

The article aims to summarise the activity of the “Medical Library Forum” (MLF) – an scholarly journal which has served to share ideas and record the work of medical university libraries and related institutions for over 16 years now. The paper presents three key stages in MLF’s history – from the idea of creating the journal in 2006 and printing the first issue in 2008, through moving the publishing activity from Łódź to Warsaw, to finally introducing the Creative Commons licence to publishing practice. The authors remark on the systematic progress of the journal – constantly bettering the level of publishing and editorial practices and strengthening the journal’s reputation by being indexed on the ministerial list, as well as the ERIH PLUS or DOAJ databases. The article puts emphasis on the journal’s support towards the open access idea, expressed by publishing in the Diamon Open Access model. Further plans for MLF’s future are also presented, such as implementing the Open Journal Systems (OJS) in the publishing process.