The Asian Student Medical Journal
©Asian Student Medical
Journal 2002-2005 All Rights Reserved
|
|
 |
|
| |
|
|
|
 Online Medical Publication And The Medical Student
Asian Student
Medical Journal May 2003 |
Dr Jyoti Dvivedi MBBS DFW DGO,
Dr Sanjay Dvivedi MBBS MS MCh
Abstract
Medical students need to access medical information from journals to keep their knowledge up-to-date. Online publication of the medical journals over the internet saves time, cost and resources. This allows rapid incorporation of major advances in medical practice. Unlike conventional print media, online journals permit multimedia enhancement of medical journal articles. It also makes feasible, publication of negative studies that enable more accurate appraisals of new research.
Introduction
The day you enter a medical college as a student, you become a student for life. Medicine is an ever changing science. The knowledge and belief that stands true today, may become a myth tomorrow. One has to be continually in touch with the recent advances in medicine, if he has to stay in the tune with changing time. This would mean reading every day, thousands of pages of relevant as well as irrelevant material of medical journals, a totally impracticable proposition in terms of time, money and mental capacity.
Internet and online medical journals prove to be a boon in such a situation. Internet makes feasible, accessing the new and old information in full relevance at affordable rates in terms of time and money, which otherwise would have been impossible. It is not just a matter of accessing the articles - the entire scenario leads you to publishing your own articles in medical journals, a so very important step in establishing your own self in the vast and congested world of medicine of today's times. The whole process of accessing and sorting of relevant information and then to design your own research module has become a very difficult task because of the ever increasing ocean of knowledge of medicine.
An answer to all these problems is -- online publication. e - Publication reduces the length of the steps of creation of a medical manuscript from submission to its publication and dissemination1. Publication on the internet massively reduces the time gap between first submission of a report to its eventual publication. This can speedily bring landmark medical knowledge to people desirous to know the recent advances. Online publication can also enrich the depth of information by permitting multimedia enhancements that cannot be provided in conventional print media. Easy unlimited access to medical research literature through the internet from one's own home/office, beyond the routine library hours, has radically changed the process of medical search. Most often, online publication is at significantly low cost but if a journal wishes to have both print and online versions simultaneously, the cost of production, is high.
The Birth Of Online Medical Journals
The world wide web was not much developed in the 1990s when e- journals started appearing with simple text format. 'Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials' was the first peer reviewed medical e- journal2. Owing to its potential of success and popularity, several other medical online journals followed this in various specialties and subspecialties. Their number is on a rapid rise, with new publications coming up in different disciplines and languages. To date, there are more than 800 online journals. Many of these are listed in www.virtualmed.netfirms.com3.
Conventional Printing: Time Consuming
Conventional print media has adopted a very lengthy procedure for publication. The routine steps in the current process adopted by printed medical journals are-
* manuscript preparation and submission
* editorial review
* submission of manuscripts to peer reviewers
* comments of peer reviewers
* revision by author/s
* editorial review of revised manuscripts
* submission of manuscript to printer
* scheduling, printing and dissemination of the print journal
Table
1:
The traffic of a print version medical journal before reaching
the hands of the reader
|
AUTHOR/S
|
Original
manuscript
|
®
|
EDITORIAL
BOARD
|
®
|
Original
manuscript
|
PEER
REVIEWERS
(2
OR 3)
|
|
|
|
|
Manuscript
with comments-
-Rejected
-Accepted
-Provisionally
accepted with changes
|
¬
|
¬
|
Manuscript
with suggestions-
-Reject
-Accept
-Accept
with changes
|
|
|
|
|
Revised
manuscript
|
®
|
®
|
Revised
manuscript
|
|
Û
± 2nd/3rd
round Û
|
Û
± 2nd/3rd
round Û
|
|
Pre-print
proof
|
¬
|
¬
|
Revised
manuscript
|
|
|
|
|
Preprint
proof revised by author
|
®
|
®
|
Preprint
proof checked by editor
|
|
|
¯
|
|
|
Printer
|
|
¯
|
|
Printer
schedules the publication of article for next issue
|
|
¯
|
|
Printed
|
|
¯
|
|
Distributed
to the reader through mail
|
Arrows
¬
®
¯
indicate transfer of manuscript by mail. It usually takes 4-14
days for a mail delivery.
Online Publication: Advantages
Peer review is a cumbersome but time honored process for analysis of new medical information. In today's busy life, peer review is an assurance to the reader that the peer reviewed material is high quality, relevant, credible and useful information. Peer reviewers are honorary experts who donate time to editorial board by reading and criticizing medical manuscripts.
Most of the medical journals undesirably reject majority of submitted manuscripts usually because of high cost of publication. Those few articles that are accepted, are subject to revisions made by authors as recommended by the editors and reviewers. During this entire process which takes months to years, the study and its results remain unavailable to medical community.
Conventional mailing services inflate the transit time in peer review process. For the journals that are published less frequently, this transit delay is detrimental to freshness of medical knowledge. Online publication and electronic peer review abolish the time lag by essentially cutting short the length of article transit times during evaluation and revision of manuscripts4. Also, the cost of review, production and distribution is markedly reduced.
World over, new journals continually emerge while subscription costs escalate. On the other hand, most medical libraries suffer from restricted funding and selective cancellation of journal subscriptions because of restricted funding. Free access online journals are the only viable option to access the information by reducing publishing cost, storage space and maintenance effort while enhancing the ease and width of access to knowledge5.
Online publication offers additional advantages. e- Technology has the potential to publish articles soon after submission and acceptance. The reader can globally access the article of interest or its part rather than subscribing to full journal. It enables the reader to search each article for selected key words or strings, to navigate quickly between tables and figures, and to jump quickly from any reference number in the text to its respective citation2. The decisive factor in online publication is the academic quality, and not the speed of mail5. For new journals like the Asian Medical Student Journal, getting quality academic material at high flow rate is essential. This is possible only through internet.
It has the ability to incorporate audio/video clips and database into an e- journal publication as well as to append the original data and to provide hypertext links1, 6. Online submission of graphic illustrations using the digital technology has cut short the labor, cost and time consumed with the conventional print media. There is virtually no limit to the length of articles published in the e- journals because of minimal cost restraint4. It is possible to eliminate any restriction to circulation of online journals.
The reduced cost of production, and may be the ease of access to the online journals allows people in developing countries, an approach to vast number of research articles7. The e- journals offer convenient and rapid access and downloading of articles of interest. It is well assumed that with increasing popularity of e- journals, the need for Xerox copying articles could be greatly reduced. The availability of a handy CD ROM of a journal volume appears to be a more pleasing and less expensive alternative to the hard bound print journal volumes which only a few can afford and maintain. The Journal of Medical Internet Research
www.jmir.org distributes the entire journal in CD ROM as part of the Intercourse project8. Websites like PubMedCentral
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
and BioMedCentral http://www.biomedcentral.com/start.asp
provide full text articles online, free of cost.
Authors can avail the 'Rapid Response' utility to get feedback from the readers; before they submit articles for peer review. The original research and the future modifications all remain archived on the web servers like
www.thelancet.com/era
and www.clinimed.netprints.org
Lastly, in conventional print media, once the journal is disseminated, no figure of the quantum of readership is available. Online journals provide a discrete outline of the readership and popularity of an article/journal, by the number of visitors on the site. Supplementary data for a research publication can be expensive by conventional means, while it can be freely achieved online in e- publication, for further research on a subject10.
Negative Studies
Conventional print media nurtures a laborious and time consuming 'publication bias' against medical research with negative results or that without statistical significance. This cost induced bias is pervasive. While it seems reasonable to reject studies with disappointing outcomes, publication of such studies is important as these negative or statistically insignificant studies will permit their incorporation into meta-analyses and more so, they will directly alert new researchers towards trials that are clinically worthless and avoid unwanted duplication of ineffective clinical studies.
Electronic Peer Review
The authentic peer review process can be replaced by a faster review process, the 'e- peer review' through the same channel but different means of transport - the email. Many a journals have already started adopting this technique for peer review. The need is, that the reviewers have to become more internet savvy. All components of peer review as practiced in print reviews, can be effectively executed over the internet. The "fast track" publication of articles allows the author to submit a manuscript electronically, track the article's progress during its peer review, and peer reviewers to send their reviews electronically and be able to know electronically, the final editorial decisions made on papers reviewed by them.
Online Medical Journals: Are There Any Demerits ?
The use of online journals is dependent on simultaneous availability of electricity, telephone, computer, access to the internet and technical know how to access information10. Albeit, with rapid development of these 'basic' life amenities, the problems in availability of access to online journals affect limited locations, which do not get access to print journals even otherwise.
Eye strain in reading articles on computer monitors is of course greater than printed material. This can be easily overcome by printing out any online journal article or its part that demands careful and repeated review. Also, the now popular liquid crystal display screens reduce the eye strain. The problem of low internet speed and crashed servers will soon be a talk of past1.
Security and adapting the page layout to electronic page format, copyright issues and degree of availability of previous issues are some of areas which need attention to, when a journal is wished to be shifted to online publication. ESPERE (electronic submission and peer review) projects are now trying article submission through web formats and secure URLs5. Lack of permanent archival is another drawback with journals which are entirely online. JMIR went offline for 6 months in 2002 and its entire archives became permanently inaccessible. The print journals however, have a more reliable system of archive maintenance.
The ease of access to scientific material offered by the internet has made plagiarism easy. In past, cheating, copying and copyright violation was a tedious job, as was publication and accessing the research material. The enormous volume of material available on the internet also makes it difficult to identify plagiarism. In such a scenario, organization like www.turnitin.com offer a ray of light by providing anti plagiarism technology, by digital encoding of the material11.
Discussion
Online medical publishing rapidly introduces a medical research to the target, the readers, by reducing the time lag between research and its dissemination and also the clinical application of these advances and the development of further research. It conserves material resources, reduces storage space and is an efficient and fast search tool. Health care professionals and medical undergraduate and post graduate students with scarce monetary resources can have a better access to medical discoveries. Online medical journals and health newsletters also facilitate consumer access to information. This is ever more important in self education about diseases. With information technology revolution, there is a fast acceptance of online journals these days. There is an instant need for the physicians and medical students to become adept to using internet to gain medical information. This is likely to be achieved soon as increasing numbers of physicians yield to the pressure of competition with their colleagues who rapidly obtain up to date information over the internet. CD ROMs of journal volumes and archives would be a welcome affair to all but none amongst medical readers. This will allow a very rapid dissemination of medical information, which is the sole purpose of any medical research. Studies have shown that 'print only' journals are less popular than those which have print as well as online versions. Further, in the journals that have a dual version, the online version is more popular than the print version12. Removing access barriers to the biomedical research literature is expected to accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich and the poor and make the literature useful to the maximum of its potential13.
Conclusions
Online publication of medical literature and research offers major savings on time and cost over the entire process of manuscript submission, review, revision and publication, and also, access and circulation of the medical research. It conserves resources and permits incorporation of updating information in publications which add to the value. Contraction of the time gap between submission and dissemination of published article allows quick utilization of rapidly renovating and increasing medical knowledge. The problems of article security and copyright violation will soon be overcome with new trials like ESPERE. It ensures that academic quality of the material and not the speed of mail be the decisive factor in the publication of an article. Electronic publishing will also make it feasible to publish negative studies that will enable critical reviews of new information and reduce repetition of worthless research. The concept of free access to biomedical literature will ensure availability of 'knowledge for all'.
Useful links: Student Journals in Medicine
There are only a handful of Medical Student Journals on the Internet, and the two largest being student versions of their professional journals. Unlike Professional Journals, Medical Student Journals are more flexible in content and design. Most of the journals publish creative works of Medical Students, unlike professional journals.
student BMJ
URL: http://www.studentbmj.com
This is the Medical Student version of the popular BMJ. The journal is published exclusively by Medical students. The Editor is a Medical Student who takes an year out of his studies . He is assisted by a panel of Editors. The content is partly generated from Medical students and partly from relevant articles published in BMJ.
ms JAMA
URL:www.ama-assn.org/sci-pubs/msjama/
The Medical Student Journal of the popular JAMA. Published by American Medical Association. Publishes creative works and articles fro JAMA.
Asian Student Medical Journal [ASMJ]
URL: http://www.asmj.org
The Asian Student Medical Journal is published exclusively by Medical students. The Journal is published continuously on the internet . The journal publishes a wide variety of articles ranging from papers to creative works. The first Medical student Journal in the continent.
The Trinity Student Medical Journal
URL: http://www.tcd.ie/tsmj
The student Journal of Trinity College. Online version is published in PDF format. Published exclusively by Medical students. The Journal publishes a wide variety of articles, mostly of students in Trinity college.
The Journal for Minority Medical Students
URL: www.minoritymedicalstudents.com
Useful sites: free Medical e-Journals
Many directories maintain information on e-journals which are free to access. Few of them useful for free access of e-journals are-
FreeMedicalJournals.com
URL: http://www.freemedicaljournals.com
Maintained by Bernd Sebastian Kamps, it is the largest index of free medical journals. The website is frequently updated and is perhaps one of the most acclaimed resource on free medical libraries.
VirtualMed
URL: http://www.virtualmed.netfirms.com/journals.html
Indexes more than 400 free medical journals. The medical journals page is the part of the medical gateway. Journals are indexed in alphabetical order and the journals indexed in MEDLINE are marked separately.
E-Journal Miner
URL: http://www.ejournal.coalliance.org
Maintained by Coalliance, it has a section for medical journals. The website also provides background information on the Journal like the publisher, contact information, address etc.
MedBioWorld
URL: http://www.medbioworld.com
Has an excellent collection of information on electronic journals [not essentially free]. The Journals are categorized on the basis of subject
References
1. Smith R. Electronic Publishing in Science: The Revolution Is Only Just Beginning. Br Med J 2001; 322, 627-8.
2. James SJ. Current Clinical Trials, New Computerized Journal. AIDS Treatment News 1992; 154
3. http://virtualmed.netfirms.com/
4. Fletcher RH, Fletcher SW. The Future of Medical Journals in the Western World. Lancet 1998; 175 II, 30-3.
5. Wood D. Electronic submission and peer review - an update on the ESPERE project. Learned Publishing 1997 10, 157-9.
6. Delamothe T ,Smith R Moving beyond Journals, the future arrives with a crash BMJ 1999; 318; 1637-1639
7. Jacobson M. Biomedical publishing and the Internet - the Message of the Medium. J Int Car Med 1998; 13, 153-4.
8. http://www.jmir.org/
9. http://clinmed.netprints.org
10. Morris S. The Pros and Cons of Electronic Journals. INASP Newsletter, Special Issue. Online Publishing 2001; Issue 18
11. http://www.turnitin.com/
12. De Groote SL, Dorsch JL Online Journals; impact on Print Journal usage Bull Med Lib Assoc 2001 October 89(4); 372-378
13. http://www.soros.org/openaccess/read.shtml
|
Dr Jyoti Dvivedi MBBS DFW DGO
Post Graduate Student
Department of Physiology
Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences
Jolly Grant, Dehradun 248140, India
sdvivedi@hotmail.com
Dr Sanjay Dvivedi MBBS MS MCh
Associate Professor in Plastic Surgery
Himalayan Institute of Medical Sciences
Jolly Grant, Dehradun 248140, India |
| This article peer reviewed by
Vinod Scaria. Returned with corrections and accepted for
publication on April 1 2003.Free reprinting and archival in any
media permitted provided the original source and a hyperlink to
the article URL maintained. |
|
