SEEd is an Italian medical publishing house, founded in 2000 and based in Turin. SEEd publishes an extensive range of medical books, multimedia tools, and biomedical journals dedicated to the retraining of doctors and other health professionals (http://www.edizioniseed.it/).

In 2010 the publisher, Simone Eandi, decided to start a new journal, Reviews in Health Care (http://journals.edizioniseed.it/index.php/rhc), and from the beginning it was in Open Access format.

Today the journal counts about 2,500 readers and, for each article, a mean of 50 downloads and 450 online visualisations.

The journal is now indexed on the major open access dbases like DOAJ, NewJour, GoogleScholar and many others.

During the 2012 Farmeconomia and Therapeutic Pathways, the “historical” journal of SEEd, established in 2000, is converted to the Open Access model (http://journals.edizioniseed.it/index.php/FE/). Also in this case we have positive results in terms of visibility: in a few months the number of readers has risen to about a thousand and for each article the mean download is about 30, with 150 online visualisations.

These two experiences are definitely positives, so we decide to transfer all our journals to the Open Access model by the middle of the 2013.

Free access to the journals’ contents in Open Access model is a good opportunity to raise the visibility of the publisher, in particular for:

• Increasing the number of visits on SEEd official web site
• Increasing the attractiveness of other SEEd products, also the traditional ones like printed books
• Attracting a greater number of authors, even from abroad
• A growth of the submissions
• Possibility to index the journals and receiving the Impact Factor
• More interest by the sponsors in buying reprints, supplements and monographs.

SEEd business model do not consider the payment of any charge by the authors. The system is sustainable due to higher revenues from the increased visibility of the products distributed according to the traditional channels.

The adopted license, Creative Commons BY, allows to reuse the published material in different ways, so that the publisher can design innovative services like on demand distribution and aggregation of different contents.

[Press release, Turin, October 25th]