dan collier

Open Medicine is an open-access peer-reviewed web-based medical journal that launched today. I’m working in the field of open-access online medical publishing and I’m glad I’m not alone in thinking the world needs more efforts like this. Read the lead editorial for an excellent analysis, excerpted below:

Medical knowledge should be public and free from undeclared influence. When possible, it should be free for those who apply it. Since people’s lives depend on it, that knowledge must be filtered several times before it is ready to use. Studies need to be peer reviewed, to have their statistics analyzed, their content edited, then copy edited, then published quickly for as wide an audience as possible. The prospect of having a high-quality source of information that held true to these principles but was also free and globally accessible was impossible to imagine 20 years ago. Paper and postage are simply too expensive. The landscape is different today. An ideal medical journal — a truly open one — is not only within our sight, it is within our reach….

Open Medicine is a new general medical journal. It will be paperless and available without charge or any other barrier to access online. We will publish peer-reviewed science and analysis as well as clinical articles. We will provide a forum for informed and inclusive debates on medicine and its application. Open Medicine will be independent of any commercial publisher or association ownership — it will be “owned” by all who read and contribute to it — and will take no advertisements from companies selling pharmaceuticals or medical devices. We will rely on voluntarism, donations and ethical advertising. Any revenue will be used to improve our ability to meet the needs of our readers and contributors.

There are so many reasons why this type of development is important. Easy access to newly acquired knowledge for doctors in poorer nations and at your local non-university-affiliated health-center, as well as sources for good information for patients, would likely lead to improved clinical results across a broad spectrum of patients and is long overdue. With the New England Journal of Medicine and most other journals filled with pharmaceutical and medical device advertisements, it may become increasingly beneficial to have someone watching the watchers. The article Direct-to-consumer advertising and expenditures on prescription drugs: a comparison of experiences in the United States and Canada is a good example of useful knowledge for many people that don’t have access to paid subscription journals. This is an interesting study with useful data for policy analysts, advertising analysts and regulators, sociologists, and casual interested readers like me.

Given just those problems, gradual reform might be more likely than a revolution in journal publishing. Everyone with a real interest could go to a library, get a poverty discount, or pay $20 for a copy of a NEJM article. But an equally important issue is that authors want to be read, researchers want to be influential, and doctors want to improve our health care. Authors write journal articles for professional prestige, there may be compensation for the study which forms the basis of an article, but that is seldom the case for writing and editing a journal article or textbook chapter. When an author’s work is accepted for publication, the publishing companies acquire copyright and lock-up the unpaid contribution behind fees and memberships. With Open Medicine, authors will retain copyright while being provided a distribution medium. Between donating control of your hard work for someone else to make a profit and loaning an extra copy of your work to all interested parties, one model has a clear advantage over the other in the long term. One day soon, academic journal publishers will confront the same dilemma faced earlier by newspapers: either make most of their content openly accessible online or become obsolete. NEJM may be medicine’s WSJ, but change is certainly coming.

The author of the editorial is working for Médecins San Frontière in Sudan and has an interesting
blog.

The 2007 Pulitzer Prize winners have been announced. My favorites for 2007 are Editorial Cartooning (one great example, and another), International Reporting, and Breaking News Photo.

The Pulitzer site archive is an amazing source of browsing material. Unfortunately, it is not the easiest site to navigate. So here are some previous winners: 2006 2005 2004 2003 2002 2001 2000

Kurt Vonnegut (1922-2007) has died. I’ve really enjoyed everything I read by him, especially Breakfast of Champions and Cat’s Cradle. Below is an excerpt of an essay he wrote in 2004.

Cold Turkey by Kurt Vonnegut

Many years ago, I was so innocent I still considered it possible that we could become the humane and reasonable America so many members of my generation used to dream of. We dreamed of such an America during the Great Depression, when there were no jobs. And then we fought and often died for that dream during the Second World War, when there was no peace.

But I know now that there is not a chance in hell of America’s becoming humane and reasonable. Because power corrupts us, and absolute power corrupts absolutely. Human beings are chimpanzees who get crazy drunk on power. By saying that our leaders are power-drunk chimpanzees, am I in danger of wrecking the morale of our soldiers fighting and dying in the Middle East? Their morale, like so many bodies, is already shot to pieces. They are being treated, as I never was, like toys a rich kid got for Christmas.

Vonnegut’s voice was unique. He was an ex-POW who survived the fire-bombing of Dresden, a former Cape Cod car salesman, and a humanist revolutionary. You have to like a man that wrote “All the true things I am about to tell you are shameless lies.”

Listening to Words aggregates links to online lectures. It is a good idea and an interesting implementation.

Browsing the site, I found an interesting video lecture by Thomas Barnett, an author and strategic planner.

Here are a couple paraphrases from his talk:

“After New Orleans, the people in Baghdad said ‘Oh, now I get it.’”

In reference to the volatile relationship between the US and China:

The Arch-Duke Ferdinand lives in Taiwan.

Of course, the entire lecture isn’t one-liners. I’d summarize the talk as ideas for improving the response after armed conflict and shifting foreign policy to adapt to globalization. Many of the ideas apply to natural and economic disasters as well. He builds on Thomas Friedman’s notion of the flat world. The talk runs an hour. The video presentation of the slides and lecturer wasn’t great, but the talk is quite good.

The World’s Most Livable Cities as ranked by BusinessWeek. Of the top 10 cities, I’ve been to Vancouver and Munich. Vancouver is a fitting choice. München was nice but I missed whatever put it in the top 10. Unless it was Oktoberfest, but I was there for Oktoberfest and there are better places for drinking beer.

javajive photography on Flickr. Lots of great photos of Indonesia, you might want to look at the sets. He has a blog, as well.

Presentation Zen had an interesting post that made me track down the This American Life video in the preceding post. The blog is a great source for links and ideas.