JPBRS – a surgical journal on its own platform
The Journal of Plastic, Breast and Reconstructive Surgery (JPBRS) publishes step-by-step surgical case reports, peer-reviewed by plastic surgeons and shared openly with colleagues around the world. The journal was created by specialists from Denmark, Sweden, Norway, the Czech Republic, England, Germany and Switzerland, and belongs to the same family as PlastSurgeon under Nordic Surgery Lab.
The challenge
I built the first JPBRS in WordPress with Bricks Builder. Submission, review and publishing relied on a form plugin, custom fields, a commenting plugin and my own plugin for the review process with scoring and dashboards. The result was a heavy plugin layer that needed constant updates, and image handling was unreliable – images could disappear when an author saved a draft.
The solution
In 2026 I rebuilt the whole platform from scratch as a custom Next.js app, with the workflow built in rather than forced into plugins.
- Case submission: Authors write their case in an editor with autosaved drafts, image and video upload, in-browser cropping and step-by-step sections.
- Built-in media library: Images live in a folder per case in several versions – original, watermarked, compressed and thumbnail.
- Peer review and editing: Reviewers score cases against fixed criteria, and editors can approve, request changes, reject or publish – all in one shared workspace for authors, reviewers and editors.
- Real-time collaboration: Several people can work on the same case at once, with visible cursors and inline comments, much like Google Docs.
- Case competition: Competitions with categories and winners shown on the front page and competition pages.
- Research-ready: Published cases can be cited properly, and the archive can be searched and filtered by topic.
- One login everywhere: Plast ID gives the same login across JPBRS, PlastSurgeon and SurgAI.
- Many languages: The public site is available in a wide range of languages.
The result
The new front page scores 100 in Lighthouse for accessibility, best practices and SEO on mobile (measured on 1 October 2026). The old WordPress site is no longer online, so there is no direct before measurement to compare with.
My assessment of the biggest gain: the plugin layer and the constant updates it required are gone, images are handled by the platform itself, the review process follows the editors' own workflow, and the journal shares its login with the rest of the suite.
What the client says
Mads has helped us develop several well-functioning digital solutions. Mads is steady, gives relevant feedback, and is easy to reach when updates need to be made or urgent problems need solving. We are happy to continue working with Mads.
Translated from Danish.
Magnus Balslev AvnstorpPlastic surgeon and consultant, founder of Nordic Surgery LabTechnology
Next.js and TypeScript with PostgreSQL and Drizzle, Better Auth for login, Tiptap as the editor and Yjs for real-time collaboration. The platform runs in Docker.