As Editors of the Journal of Feline Medicine and Surgery (JFMS), and as representatives of the American Association of Feline Practitioners (AAFP), International Society of Feline Medicine (ISFM) and SAGE, the publisher, we are proud to mark the launch of our new journal JFMS Open Reports with this opening Editorial. This new title joins JFMS as a peer-reviewed source of clinically relevant information for practitioners and researchers interested in the healthcare of domestic cats. While JFMS (available at  jfms.com) continues as a subscription-based journal, JFMS Open Reports (available at  jfmsopenreports.com) is breaking new ground for us as an open access journal. This brings significant advantages, principally in terms of breadth of scope and reach.

Sister journals – providing the ultimate resource for feline medicine and surgery

JFMS – now in its 17th year – receives a large number of high-quality submissions, but balancing publication costs and subscription fees means that the number of manuscripts we can publish is restricted. This particularly affects case reports, short case series and short communications reporting regional prevalence of diseases. While these manuscripts are valuable and contribute to the scientific literature, because of the volume of papers submitted to JFMS we no longer have space to publish them.

JFMS Open Reports has been developed primarily to address this problem. The new journal is specifically designed to allow us to publish these types of manuscripts under a creative commons licence, making them freely accessible to any reader, whether or not they have a subscription to JFMS. We anticipate that JFMS Open Reports will allow us to publish more studies presenting valuable local, national or regional data on particular diseases than we have hitherto been able to, and to be a natural open access repository for good-quality case reports and short case series. At the same time, we shall continue to develop JFMS as the journal for high-quality clinical research and substantial clinical studies contributing novel information in the important field of feline medicine and surgery.

The aims and scope, broader audience reach and rapid time to electronic publication of JFMS Open Reports articles will be important for authors. As with other open access journals, the cost of publishing is covered by the author with an ‘article processing charge’ (or APC). SAGE has set the APC for JFMS Open Reports at a very competitive rate, with an additional substantial discount for members of the AAFP and ISFM, as well as other officially affiliated organisations. Full details on these charges and all other aspects relevant to publishing within JFMS Open Reports are available at  jfmsopenreports.com.

We would like to congratulate and thank the authors of the first published reports in this new venture! Thank you for waiting patiently while JFMS Open Reports became a reality, and we hope you are as pleased as we are with the final result.

To everyone reading this, we hope you enjoy this new format. You will see that it bears a close resemblance to its sister title. That is no coincidence – we wish to put the experience gained over the past 17 years on JFMS to very good effect.