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.
ideas & links
posted by:
dan @
18 Apr 2007 19:24
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