How SEMS Journal became a globally accessible platform for sports medicine
When Boris Gojanovic began discussing the future of the SEMS Journal in late 2018, the question was not whether scientific publishing would become digital — that transition had long since begun elsewhere. The question was whether a comparatively small Swiss medical society could realistically build and maintain a modern scientific platform of its own. For decades, the journal of the Swiss Society of Sports Medicine (SEMS) had existed as a respected print publication within the national sports medicine community. Four issues per year reached approximately 1,000 readers through SEMS membership distribution, congresses and professional events. The printed journal established itself as an important scientific and professional reference point within Swiss sports medicine — and remains highly valued by its readership today.
At the same time, international publications such as the British Journal of Sports Medicine (BJSM) demonstrated how digital dissemination could significantly expand scientific visibility and international reach. For SEMS, however, replicating such an infrastructure was far from straightforward. The organisational and financial resources available to a national specialist society in Switzerland were modest in comparison.
The apparent limitation ultimately shaped the philosophy of the project
Rather than following the increasingly common model of restricted or subscription-based access, SEMS deliberately chose a different path: open access from the outset. Scientific articles, clinical reviews and educational content should be freely accessible to physicians, therapists, researchers and students — in Switzerland and internationally.
The ambition was not technological prestige, but scientific accessibility.
The objective was clear: create a searchable, citable and internationally visible knowledge platform for sports medicine. A key element of this strategy was the assignment of DOI numbers to every scientific article, ensuring permanent referenceability and integration into international citation systems. Equally important was the structure of the platform itself: content had to remain easy to navigate, easy to discover and accessible across disciplines and languages. What followed was less the result of major institutional investment than of sustained personal commitment. Together with rubmedia, Boris Gojanovic helped build the first version of sems-journal.ch largely through pragmatic solutions, persistence and a remarkable amount of voluntary engagement. The Editorial Board ensured scientific quality and peer-review standards, while rubmedia coordinated publication workflows, organised production, managed design and operated the digital infrastructure behind the scenes. The collaboration required considerable flexibility on all sides, particularly because many contributors were active clinicians and researchers whose primary responsibilities remained patient care, teaching and scientific work.
The result exceeded expectations
Since the platform’s launch in 2019, online usage has increased continuously year after year. What began as a national publication with a stable print circulation evolved into a digital platform reaching hundreds of thousands of readers and visitors internationally. Today, the online readership surpasses the traditional print circulation many times over, while the printed edition continues to fulfil an important and highly appreciated role within the professional community.
Rather than replacing print, the digital platform complemented and amplified it.
The physical journal continues to provide editorial structure, visibility within the Swiss sports medicine landscape and a curated reading experience valued by readers. The online platform, meanwhile, extends accessibility, discoverability and international reach far beyond the society’s traditional circulation.
Articles are increasingly discovered through search engines, academic indexing services and external citations — precisely the visibility SEMS originally intended to foster through its open-access strategy.
Particularly remarkable is the breadth of topics attracting international attention. Clinical sports medicine, paediatric sports injuries, exercise physiology, psychopharmacology in athletes and recovery science all rank among the platform’s most accessed subjects. The readership is no longer confined to Switzerland alone; the journal has become part of a broader international knowledge exchange within sports medicine and sports science.
The analytics also illustrate how professional reading habits have evolved. While desktop access still dominates, mobile usage now accounts for more than one third of all visits — confirming that scientific information is increasingly consumed flexibly across clinical, academic and educational settings.
Interestingly, a growing proportion of visitors now arrive via academic search engines, international partner organisations and even AI-assisted discovery tools. This underlines how scientific visibility today increasingly depends not only on publication quality, but also on digital accessibility and structured discoverability.
Like many long-running digital projects, however, the platform eventually began to show the limitations of its original technical architecture. By 2025, several functions were no longer fully operational, and maintaining the ageing infrastructure had become increasingly difficult. The temporary decline in usage visible in recent statistics reflects this transition period rather than reduced scientific relevance.
For SEMS and rubmedia, this was not the end of a successful chapter, but the beginning of the next one.
In autumn 2025, the decision was therefore taken to fundamentally modernise the platform — visually, structurally and technologically. The relaunch focused not only on improving usability and long-term maintainability, but also on strengthening the connection between print publication and digital publishing workflows.
The newly redesigned sems-journal.ch preserves the original philosophy of openness and scientific accessibility while providing a more robust infrastructure for future development. At the same time, the print journal continues to evolve alongside the digital platform, maintaining the editorial quality and professional identity that readers value. This coexistence is not a contradiction, but part of the journal’s strength. The new platform is therefore more than a redesigned website. It represents the continuation of an idea first articulated by Boris Gojanovic: that even a comparatively small scientific society can create a meaningful international presence when scientific quality, open accessibility and long-term commitment come together.
For a specialised medical publication originating from Switzerland, this is no small achievement.
Correspondence
Pascal Rub
Publisher, SEMS Journal
pascal.rub@rubmedia.ch
