Publishing an Open Access Medical Journal

ACNR a peer reviewed open access neurology journal. The aim is to provide practicing neurologists and rehabilitation specialists up-to-date information on the latest advances in their fields.

ACNR (Advances in Clinical Neuroscience and Rehabilitation) publishes a specialist medical journal. We’ve worked closely with the ACNR team to create a site that makes it easier to get content online quickly. The website works alongside a print publication, so the two mediums need to co-exist effectively. In addition to an easier editing process the new site allows editors to submit content to online medical open access directories like the DOAJ using their API.

We believe that part of making this content easier to work with involves using the new WordPress Gutenberg editor. The resulting layouts are easier to amend and there are blocks available for most content types.

Features in this site include attractive typography, an easier navigation and custom carousels for content like events. We’re using custom post types to separate out editing areas and to make it easier to create custom templates. We’re using the Advanced Ads plugin to manage the ad inventory in the site.

Technical Notes

To jump into some of the technical detail for this build, we used Foundation for the framework. We’ve had great results using this as a starting point for projects. As usual a number of great plugins are used to keep the site ticking over, these include Gravity Forms, Download Monitor and the always excellent Yoast SEO for optimising SEO. This version of the site features a number of block plugins, including Layout Grid, and WP Table Builder.