Transcript The “real shit” on writing for medical and public health

What I want to talk about
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Knowing me, knowing you
Why do you want to publish?
What do journals want to publish?
What is the publication process?
How is publishing changing?
The verdict
Everything has changed
or
Nothing of consequence has changed
Publication = making public
only difference is being posted online and not
rolling off the printing press
Who still prints out that really important article
to read?
People are mainly using journal sites as
electronic archives (searching definitely
better)
US librarian panel, May 2006
• “When we have online resources, no one accesses
print.”
• “If it’s online we want it; if it’s print we don’t”
• “Paper is a terrible way of distributing information.
Journal content belongs online.”
And it’s got “worse” since then
• Some young researchers aren’t even aware that the
journal they’re accessing exists in paper
Differences
DISTRIBUTION
• Speed
• Geographical “reach”
• BMJ (1840)
• 100,000 print copies go to BMA members,
10,000 go to librarians
• bmj.com (1995)
• Now has three times the circulation of print
BMJ
Number of Online v Paper
readers
1995
1998
Online
now = 3 x
Paper
2001
2006
Differences
DISCOVERY
• Everything is much more available whether you know
what you’re looking for or not
• The Google effect
• Back issue digitisation
(Find BMJ on www.pubmedcentral.org)
Differences
THE ARTICLE
References hypertext linking
Forward referencing
Data
Multimedia
1997-2002-2008
1997 predictions: the view from 2002
Differences
ACCESS
Paper,print, binding, postage = € € € €
Marginal cost of moving digital information around = nearly zero
Still, most traditional journals maintain access controls
(more on this later)
Exploiting the new media: to reduce print frustrations
Frustrations due to timing
Frustrations due to space
Frustrations due to the medium of paper
The common trajectory
electronic
paper
Time
Articles ahead of print
Articles instead of print
Canonical versions
New sorts of content: blogs, podcasts, polls,
multimedia
electronic
paper
Time
Advantages: online v print
Online
Print
Length?
Full text (or
more)
Summary (or less)
Timeliness?
Immediate
After a variable
delay
Breadth?
Multiple
Single
Interactivity?
Immediate:
srapid response
Delayed
Letters to the editor
Q: Which is the real journal?
electronic
paper
A: The e journal is the journal
Where is this heading?
PoP, or Publish
oblivious to Print
electronic
paper
Exploiting the new media: to do new stuff
• Breakdown the barriers between the journal and the
world
The way we were
The distance between us
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unsolicited
solicited
[email protected]
Theme issues chosen by readers
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Global voices on the AIDS catastrophe
War
Evaluating the quality of health information on the internet
The limits of medicine and the medicalisation of human
experience
Road traffic crashes
Neurodegenerative diseases
Doctors' well being
What is a good doctor and how can we make one
Managing chronic diseases
Doctor-patient communication and relationships
What doesn't work and how to show it
[email protected]
Exploiting the new media: to do new stuff
• Open access
Open access: the context
Open access: the philosophy
“If you have an apple and I have an apple and
we exchange these apples then you and I will
still each have one apple. But if you have an
idea and I have an idea and we exchange
these ideas, then each of us will have two
ideas.”
George Bernard Shaw (irish playwright)
Open access: the vision
It's easy to say what would be the ideal online
resource for scholars and scientists: all papers
in all fields, systematically interconnected,
effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable,
from any researcher's desk, worldwide for
free.
- Steven Harnad
Open access: the definition
Electronic versions of the full text of
peer reviewed, original research
articles made freely available to all,
immediately on publication.
Open access: the implementation
The (much reduced) costs of online
publishing were met by the authors
(funders) rather than readers
(librarians)
old
new
author
author
manuscript + copyright
€
manuscript + €
Free access
to all
The funders’ revolt
As a funder of research, we are committed to ensuring
that the results of the science we fund are disseminated
widely and are freely available to all. Unfortunately, the
distribution strategies currently used by many
publishers prevent this.
The fundamental point is that as a research funder we
have to question whether it is right that we, and others,
are in the position of having to pay to read the results
of the research that we fund.
Wellcome Trust
Revolting funders
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NIH
Wellcome Trust
UK research councils
NHS (maybe soon)
EU
(And revolting authors too, who are self
archiving on institutional repositories and
elsewhere)
Web 2.0
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Interactivity
Community
User generated content
Social networking….
……how could that translate into scientific journal
practice?
Where might journals go?
Paper is brief and beautiful and I love it, but it’s a
wholly inadequate medium to conduct the
conversations that humanity has to have. What were
journals created for in the first place? To enable
knowledge creation by conversation, except that
every exchange took six months. What we need is
much more proficient knowledge creation.
- Bela Hartnavy, 1996
Conversation
“Whenever I am lonely
at night, I look at a large
map depicting 61 000
internet routers spread
throughout the world. I
imagine sending out a
spark, an idea, and a
colleague from another
country echoing that
idea to his colleagues,
over and over again,
until the electronic
chatter resembles the
chanting of monks.”
- CA Pickover
Where might journals go?
“The power of bringing together the right minds around a subject
in an on-line dialogue, well facilitated, well deliberated, I think
has enormous potential to help us get through issues that we’ve
never solved before. You see this embodied in the open source
model for software creation. But that same model could apply to
policy issues, social issues, educational issues.”
- Mario Morino
Where might journals go?
“The development of web and internet
technologies may well signal the next big leap in
the evolution of thought and reason. For we now
have a medium in which ideas can travel, mutate,
recombine and propagate with unprecedented
ease and (increasingly) across the old barriers of
culture, language, geography and central
authority.”
- Andy Clark
Where might this lead for the scientific article?
So has the new technology
Changed everything
or
Changed nothing of any importance
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And - what are your predictions for the next five
years?