Have medical journals missed the Web 2.0 roller coaster? - Buck - 2012 - Emergency Medicine Australasia - Wiley Online Library

Use the link to access the full text article (DOI: 10.1111/j.1742-6723.2012.01570.x) published in the current issue of Emergency Medicine Australasia (EMA) from WIley.  The abstract reads as follows: “Access for clinicians to medical information has never been easier or faster, with the specialty of emergency medicine leading the world in the online dissemination of information to its practitioners. This has allowed those training in and practising emergency medicine to stay abreast of their field with relatively little effort. Australasian emergency physicians are among those pioneering online medical education and the use of social media.  Three years ago in this journal Cadogan provided an in-depth synopsis of many of the available Web 2.0 resources that could be of use to medical professionals, and their potential utility and popularity within the rapidly growing Australasian and international emergency medicine community. Unfortunately, it appears that his call to ‘get with the times’ has fallen on deaf ears in the medical journal publishing world.¹  Medical journals in general have been slow to adapt to the online paradigm, with few really using the vast array of social media and Web 2.0 tools for distributing journal content. Modern online business and marketing models are also scarce within the journal publishing world. Although some emergency medicine journals have adopted a range of Web 2.0 tools, such as supplemental content in online articles, real-time comments and forums, social media plug-ins, videos, podcasts and more (e.g. Annals of Emergency Medicine, Academic Emergency Medicine and the Emergency Medicine Journal), others (such as Resuscitation, the American Journal of Emergency Medicine, Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine and this journal Emergency Medicine Australasia) have shown no signs of modernising their content. The latter journals, for instance, simply provide digitised versions of their print articles, and charge significant fees for non-subscribers to purchase individual items.  Meanwhile, there is discussion around the utility of social media for scientists and researchers, as many are interested in Web 2.0 tools that will help them ‘do science’ rather than ‘talk about science’. Some feel that journals should be helping develop these tools, for example data gathering and analysis, rather than simply promoting published material.²  Several issues have arisen as a result of the way in which modern medical information is created and the speed at which it can be accessed and distributed, particularly in the field of emergency medicine. These have direct implications for the particular niche of medical journal publishing and social media, and are discussed below.”