Bulletin of the History of Medicine (BHM) approaches open access as a scholarly and historical problem rather than a simple distribution mechanism. The field itself has long shown how medical knowledge circulates unevenly through archives, proprietary databases, institutional boundaries, and state regulations. Our open access policy is designed with these lessons in mind. It aims to widen access to historical research while maintaining the editorial stability and bibliographic reliability that make the journal a durable part of the scholarly record.
BHM operates under a hybrid open-access model supported by Johns Hopkins University Press. Authors may make the final accepted manuscript openly available in institutional repositories or disciplinary archives after a defined embargo period. This ensures that research funded by public institutions, philanthropic foundations, and international agencies can circulate freely, while the version of record remains maintained by the Press to guarantee authoritative citation, stable metadata, and preservation standards that mirror the archival practices valued by historians.
Open access within this framework permits reading, downloading, and non-commercial reuse for research, teaching, and scholarly communication. Any form of redistribution must preserve accurate citation and cannot modify the intellectual content or distort the analytical claims of the original work. Authors retain copyright, and those who wish to expand the range of permissible reuse may select one of the Creative Commons licenses offered by the Press. These licenses specify boundaries for derivative work, commercial redistribution, and data extraction, ensuring clarity for libraries, educators, and international research communities that rely on consistent legal terms.
This policy is grounded in the understanding that historical scholarship gains value when it moves beyond disciplinary and institutional walls. At the same time, the journal recognizes that high-quality editorial work, peer review, revision, copyediting, and long-term digital stewardship create the conditions for responsible open access. By balancing public availability with rigorous preservation and citation practices, BHM advances a model of access that is historically informed, ethically aligned with the profession, and attentive to the ways that knowledge is produced, transmitted, and safeguarded over time.