Numero: 3 - 2002
 

Autori

A writer's diary in the year 2015

Tim Albert

Tim Albert went to a seminar on the future of scholarly publishing. He came out with this vision of the future.

Monday

The start of the working week. As a full-time trainer of medical writers and editors, I need to keep on top of the growing journalology literature. So when I get down to breakfast my Personal Information Centre has printed out for me a list of news stories describing the articles in this field published anywhere in the world in the last seven days. I'm a member of the World Federation of Teachers of Medical Writing, and their e-library gives a great service. Some e-libraries charge your credit card any time you log onto them, but this one comes out of my annual subscription - and I can get onto 90 per cent of the world's databases for no extra charge. Since there are about 2,000 of them now - held by the big three publishers, groups of little ones, many of the major universities, charities, the pharmaceutical companies and even individual researchers - it's really useful.

Tuesday

I do a literature search, which means putting in some key words and going off for lunch. By the time I come back it has found 10,739 papers. I have no alternative but to buy in some help: I log onto one of the new reference gathering services (the one I prefer is in India) and send them some instructions on what I am looking for. By the time I get back from lunch they have sent me a list of 47 abstracts. I print out 25 of them. They look fine to me, but with one exception: I specifically wanted a particular paper written in 1997, but they tell me that they no longer have the technology to read that file.

Wednesday

Good news. An email from The Lancet to say that the article I submitted last week has gone through peer review and is going on their database on Friday. I paid the £100 for the peer review, and decide to pay another £100 for the First Class service. This means that they will report on it in their paper version, issue press releases to the newspapers, send out some alerts to all those who have registered an interest in this area, and list it on their home page for a week. So with luck my paper will get a lot of «hits».

Thursday

I run a course today, this time for young doctors who are having to write their first paper as part of their personal development plans. It's a lot easier these days, now we have got rid of that convoluted IMRAD structure: all articles now start with a clear one sentence summary - and the rest just follows behind. All these youngsters want to get into the Top Hundred Databases - but at least it's a bit more logical than that stupid citation business we were using 20 years ago. Now we simply record the number of electronic «hits» to each paper. In the evening I attend a meeting of the disciplinary committee of the Committee of Publication Ethics. It was a case of an Italian doctor who had submitted a paper to one of the big journals. Someone on the staff thought it sounded familiar. So they did a FraudSearch programme, and found that it had been written by another author and published in a Chinese journal. We banned the doctor from publishing for five years. He didn't like it, but thankfully these cases are pretty rare since we started to punish people who did this kind of thing.

Friday

The start of the weekend (how ever did we manage on a five day week?). I receive my copy of the BMJ; I must say it's got better and better since it rebranded as the Best Medical Journal and moved to San Francisco. And I still love Lord Smith's editorials. My Information Centre has a 16-page full colour paper journal ready for me at breakfast, and I can read summaries of what's gone on the electronic database today. I also get a 4-page summary on medical writing - again some more articles on the database, but a useful review article by one of the editors.

Saturday

I decide to write up a report of that seminar I went to the other day. These voice activators are great: you just speak to the computer, and then it sorts out things like grammar and spelling and references. I also have a really useful programme called MarketPlace which puts each article into the style of your target journal, and it will also make a pretty good prediction as to who will be asked to review it. In the evening my Information Centre alerts me to the fact that the Textbook of Medical Editing, which I bought a few years ago, has just been updated. I print out the new chapter to have a look.

Sunday

Disaster. The electricity went off at 10.30 in the morning, and stayed off for seven hours. It happens quite often these days (I knew we should have gone over to the Euros in 2002). Anyway, I managed to find a pencil and a piece of paper at the bottom of a cupboard, so was able to finish this article. Some of those old skills can be useful after all.