as part of its mission to  support researchers in the production and sharing of knowledge in a rapidly changing publishing industry the university library system , university of pittsburgh ( uls ) has partnered with the rehabilitation engineering and research center ( rerc ) on telerehabilitation to produce the international journal of telerehabilitation ( ijt ) . in its role as publisher , the uls seeks to transform the traditional subscription - based model of scholarly communication , promote the principle of open access to scholarly research , and incentivize scholars worldwide to join in this commitment . this novel interdisciplinary collaboration engages librarians , information technologists , publishing professionals , practitioners , researchers , policy experts , and engineers . established in 2008 , the ijt is one of the first scholarly journals to publish peer - reviewed research specifically focused on telerehabilitation and includes original research , case studies , technical reviews , and policy papers . the ijt is published biannually and has thus far produced six issues and a pre - publication issue . articles are vetted through a rigorous peer - review process for quality and then offered free of charge to the world through open access immediately upon publication . no author fees are charged by the journal , further reducing the barriers to publish . the ijt provides an accessible version of all published articles formatted to work well with text - to - speech software . for non - textual content , the accessible version includes language that conveys a detailed description of the information contained within the graph , table , or image . the open journal systems ( ojs ) software enables the flow of scholarly content from initial author submissions through online publication and indexing . the platform provides a set of reading tools to extend the use of scholarly content through rss feeds and postings to facebook , twitter , and other social media so that potential readers can discover journal articles via blogs , databases , search engines , and library collections . the ijt is registered with several major indexing and abstracting services , such as the directory of open access journals , a collection of free full - text quality - controlled scientific and scholarly journals ; ulrich s , the global source for periodicals ; ebsco discovery services , one of the world s premiere abstracting and indexing services for scholarly content ; and the open archives registry ; and others . data about the ijt s readership was generated on april 2 , 2012 at 3:21 p.m. using affinium netinsight 7.3 ( copyright  19962008 unica corporation ) for web activity between march 1 , 2011february 29 , 2012 , including : user domains ; visitor hits ; total page views ; most frequent referrers ; robot / spider summary ; and temporal and browser summaries . as depicted in table 1 , the ijt was viewed 44,843 times between march 1 , 2011february 29 , 2012 , with 202,290 total visits . readers from over 40 countries accessed ijt during this period , with the top ten being : united states , russian federation , ukraine , united kingdom , latvia , germany , italy , australia , poland , and france . the collaboration is also fostering the development of an interactive web - based product dedicated to disseminating information about telerehabilitation . planned also are content additions to high volume , open source dissemination vehicles such as wikipedia . this model collaboration exemplifies a best - practice interdisciplinary partnership that could be replicated by institutions worldwide to achieve broader dissemination of peer - reviewed scholarly research results through open access .
this publisher s report describes the collaboration between a university library system s scholarly communication and publishing office and a federally funded research team , the rehabilitation engineering research center ( rerc ) on telerehabilitation . 
 this novel interdisciplinary collaboration engages librarians , information technologists , publishing professionals , clinicians , policy experts , and engineers and has produced a new open access journal , international journal of telerehabilitation , and a developing , interactive web - based product dedicated to disseminating information about telerehabilitation . 
 readership statistics are presented for march 1 , 2011 - february 29 , 2012 .