The Safe Use of Ultrasound in Medical Diagnosis

BIROPEN: OPEN ACCESS MEETS FLEXIBILITY During Open Access Week in October 2012, the British Institute of Radiology launched BIROpen (Figure 1), an open access option for authors of accepted articles in BJR and all other BIR published journals. BJR's first open access article, "A survey of the practice and management of radiotherapy linear accelerator quality control in the UK" [1], was published in the November 2012 issue and was shortly followed by the BIR's first open access book, "The safe use of ultrasound in medical diagnosis" [2] (Figure 2), which is freely available to download in e-book format (http:// www.birjournals.org/site/books/ultrasound.xhtml). Since its launch, the e-book has been downloaded more than 1000 times, representing a huge success for the book and our open access initiative.