Monday, January 7, 2013

Openness and Transparency

 

 

Openness and transparency are not limited to medical records within the confines of health care (regulated by HIPAA for privacy), but is also occurring rapidly in academia and the logistics of publication of peer reviewed journals.

At one time articles were not published until they were presented at medical meetings, and symposia. This has changed radically.

Our sister blog, Digital Health Space also attempts to guide readers to close the space between providers, scientists, and patients. This mission statement is in the header for each post.

If one searches the medical articles a decade or more ago, you would find many findings reported in “Transactions…..of the Academy of ………. These articles would sometime take months or even a year to become public knowledge.

The process sequestered many findings from other professionals and even the general public  It tended to magnify ‘the secret society of academia” and specialists.

Change has taken place, and is explained further on PMC (PubMed Central).

Policy and Submission Process

A a result of NIH's Public Access policy, the final, peer reviewed author manuscripts of journal articles that are supported by NIH funding must be deposited into PMC via the NIH Manuscript Submission System (NIHMSS), as soon as the articles have been accepted for publication.

Specifically, the final manuscript supplied to PMC is the version that the journal has accepted for publication, including any revisions that the author has made during the peer review process.

The published version of the article usually includes additional changes made by the journal's editorial staff after acceptance of the author's final manuscript. These edits may be limited to matters of style and format or they could include more substantive changes made with the concurrence of the author.

authorms_nihp_example.jpg

 

Display of the Citation in PMC

The citation for the manuscript version of an article in PMC includes a reference to the published article. In addition, if the article includes a digital object identifier (DOI) or is from a journal that participates in NCBI's Link Out service, then the reference to the published article also provides a direct link to the full text of the article at the journal site.

For those physicians and scientists as well as patients this is a direct shortcut to knowledge….Patients do have a caveat that some of these articles are difficult to understand.  However most articles  have a summary/comment at the end which very nicely summarizes the gobbledygook .

Similar policies are also in place for papers supported by funding from agencies in the UK, Europe, and Canada. These manuscripts may be deposited through the Europe PMC submission system or the PMC Canada submission system.

 

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