2007-19-2-Editorial - Saudi Dental Journal

ISSN (Print) 1013-9052
EISSN 1658-3558

The Saudi Dental Journal,
P.O. Box 52500,
Riyadh 11563,
Kingdom of Saudi Arabia

Tel.	966-1-467-7328
Fax.	933-1-467-7308 / 966-1-467-7534
Email	saudidj@ksu.edu.sa

Editorial

Free at last: The future of scientific reach out

Sukumaran Anil, BDS, MDS, PhD, FICD, FPFA

The scientific publishing is passing through revolutionary changes with the advent of electronic age publishing. The advancements in computers and word processing softwares have enabled authors to create electronic files in accordance with their thoughts and findings, and streamline those more efficiently. The internet has indeed freed everyone from the bondages of the publisher, book seller and purse strings. During the last few years, the transition from traditional publishing to electronic publishing has gained momentum. The advantages of electronic distribution of content are too obvious and will help promote online publishing further.

The websites have already emerged as a recognized platform for high quality academic publishing. The fast growing technology allows authors and readers to enjoy the possibilities of distributing rich multimedia such as color images, sound or movies instantly. The reach and visibility of online publishing will greatly benefit authors. Some studies suggest that online journals have a reach of 4 to 7 times more than their print counterparts.

The use of web based tools for review, production and distribution of scientific information takes genuine publishing processes away from publishers towards the scholar. The automatic e-mail alerts of reviewing deadlines, advanced document templates and conversion mechanisms as well as end user compliant Web Content Management Systems (CMS) and technical distribution standards such as Open Archives Initiative (OAI) are instrumental in transferring the traditional editorial office to scholars’ desktops.

Unfettered Opportunities
The electronic publishing initiative is a great boon for smaller publishers and individual scholars. Internet powered individual publisher can now take on any Goliath in the industry. Medical knowledge should be public and free from undeclared influence. The electronic initiatives in developing countries have already shaken the monopoly of some giants in disseminating information. A shake out will select the few survivors, who will provide high quality medical content for all health care providers seeking such information.

This will also make the “peer review process” more transparent and the researchers will rate the content and its impact promptly. Studies need to be peer reviewed, to have their statistics analyzed, their content edited, copy edited, then published quickly for as wide an audience as possible. Academic institutions and universities will also recognize these emerging sites and accept online publishing as an additional tool for academic promotion. Universities could try other means to make web publication as prestigious as paper publication. They could also exhort people to follow such journals, and instruct tenure committees to value these. The UK has been practicing for several years in its research-assessment exercise equal status for online and paper publication. The point to note is that the equal recognition for e-publishing did not stopped the flow of papers in print journals from UK researchers. In fact, the established medical databases will pick the leaders from the net and include them into their index, enhancing furthermore the visibility and benefits from the authors’ point of view.

Ensuring Authenticity
An active and vigorous debate about a multitude of items such as subscriptions, review process, etc has already been among researchers and medical societies. How do we ensure the accuracy and authenticity of facts mushrooming in e-publications? First, the Journal must ensure a quality peer review process for every version produced, whether print paper or electronic. Employ quality editors for ensuring that the content is scientifically correct and readable. An ombudsman mechanism to review the e-journals periodically and find out the bogus one will also be a good idea. Those who doubt the originality or accuracy of any journal can approach the ombudsman with complaints.

Advantage to Medical Societies
Not only researchers, medical societies will also gain from online publishing, which gives them the opportunity to offer value-added services to their members, like CME content, e-commerce, electronic abstract submission, multimedia education and discussion groups. E-publishing would make a strong impact on the royalty structure offered by the traditional publishers. The e-publishing route would definitely have a niche in vanity publishing. More and more textbooks will be e-published, if interactivity with authors is provided, downloading is allowed and the students are charged less on a usage basis. Reference text and e-journals would constitute the greatest niche market. The present scenario is that most of the e-journals that have made a mark have the support of p-versions (and publishers have invented all kinds of tricks to lure the librarians in procuring both the e-copy and the p-copy). But, soon we will have more e-journals with their own identity.

Dynamic Links
Another freedom that e-journals give is that of links. Links from electronic articles can lead backward, forward, and sideways to other articles. The end result is that “a single document is no longer the pivot of knowledge but rather a node in a cognitive web in a system of coupled databases. According to David Weinberger 1, a document is the first cultural artifact to be subverted by the web: “It makes links beyond the document’s covers an integral part of every document. What once was literally a tightly bound entity has been ripped into pieces and thrown into the air.”

These multidirectional links make it easier to fit articles into their intellectual genealogy and determine which articles were crucial to the evolution of an idea. Citation mapping renders these associations visible. Eventually electronic publishing will turn scientific papers from dead documents into live ones and the live publication will evolve continuously.

Open Access Policy
Open access holds promise to remove both price constraint and permission barrier to the scientific communication by using Internet. The number of open access journals is rising steadily, and new publishing models are rapidly evolving to test new ways to increase readership and access. Proponents of open access tout the increasing influence of e-journals to a higher readership achieved through free access. Others contend that, over the long-term, editorial quality is best supported through traditional business models. Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature on the Internet and making it available free of charge will definitely help to remove the barriers to serious search. Free, unfettered and open access to health information is a basic human right; essential for sustainability of the planet and for peace. Lack of access to reliable, trusted information in developing countries has contributed to many intractable contributed health problems.

Evidence-Based Medicine
Clinicians frequently use online evidence primarily to support clinical decisions related to direct patient care. The practice of evidence-based medicine requires skills that are not traditionally part of medical training. These include precisely defining a patient problem, and what information is required to resolve the problem; conducting an efficient search of the literature; selecting the best of the relevant studies, and applying the rules of evidence to determine their validity.

Systematic reviews are based largely on research that has been done in developed countries. One of the reasons for this is the relative lack of research in developing countries. Even when the research has been conducted in these countries, it might not be published or if it is published, it might not be in a journal that is indexed in the widely used bibliographic databases such as MEDLINE and EMBASE. Thus, despite the best efforts of many reviewers, relevant studies may easily be missed. Excluding studies on the basis of language or region is generally not considered good practice in systematic reviewing. The electronic publishing is changing the face of this situation and most of the developing countries are able to publish evidence-based studies.

To conclude the electronic publishing of medical research will allow a web-based, online peer review system that brings editors, reviewers and authors together to communicate rapidly through a worldwide portal. This saves time, opens up the process and brings closer the true contemporaneous publishing. Electronic publishing increases the speed and content of information transfer and decreases the cost of publication. It vastly improves traditional means for disseminating, exchanging and retrieving information. It facilitates contacts, discussions and cooperation among scientists and may lead to increased challenges poised to the publishers. These healthy trends, as envisaged, will do much good for scientific research activities in the future.

REFERENCES

1. Weinberger W. Small pieces loosely joined: How the web shows us who we really are. Oxford: Perseus Press, 2002.

Dr. Sukumaran Anil, BDS, MDS, PhD, FICD, FPFA

Associate Professor in Periodontics, Department of Preventive Dental Sciences
College of Dentistry, King Saud University, Riyadh, Saudi Arabia.