RE: Open Access, journalism, & promoting the academy

["David Goodman" <David.Goodman@liu.edu>]

Dear Ms. Dittrich,

What you say about medical journalism's role in disseminating information
is of course correct; to a similar degree it is true of other sciences.
Both publishers and research institutions have active press officers for
the purpose, The natural desire of someone who has read an intriguing news
item is to find out more about the subject, and thus it is particularly
important that those articles with press coverage be available.

Indeed, the Washington Principles themselves, minimal though some of us
think them, say that the signatories "will continue to support the
following forms of free access... Selected important articles of interest
are free on line from the moment of publication."

If you follow these principles, it would certainly include those articles
to which you refer. I notice from your web site that you do make selected
articles available, but only for one month from the current issue. If I
interpret correctly, your present limitations do not really fit the
meaning of "free on line from the moment of publication."

I recognize your need for additional subscriptions. I do not see how
restricting access to your journal will get them.  Rather, making it more
visible might. In my experience as a biomedical librarian, this is one of
the relatively few journals that people do pick up and read, not just
refer to for known articles.

You are published for the Association of American Medical Colleges. The
American medical schools, taken collectively, certainly have the funds to
support your publication. Their general operating funds ultimately come
from the public--from the government in the form of grant overhead and
payments for patient care, and in considerable part directly from
individuals and their insurors. If your organization considers your
journal important--and well it should--it would seem to be a very suitable
candidate for an Open Access journal.

Yours,

David Goodman, Ph.D
Associate Professor
Palmer School of Library and Information Science
Long Island University
dgoodman@liu.edu

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Right now, we promote articles published in our (non-OA) journal, and make
the full-text of the articles available to journalists.  The text is also
available to local media if they want it, and to the author's institution
and its PR dept. if they ask for it.  It is in our interest to promote
articles we publish.  We also direct media contacts both to our journal's
editor and to the first author of articles of interest for interviews.

We recently added an "In the News" button to our Web page to highlight
coverage of our journal in various media.  So, again, we are keenly
interested in getting press coverage.

Our journal, alas, isn't always the most press-worthy, but we are trying!

I know some will bemoan the fact that we make articles free to the press
that we do NOT make free to the average reader.  I won't get into that
wrangle here except to say that we are a small society journal that (1)
gives most of its press run free to members and (2) has operated in the
red for its entire existence.  Two of my goals as managing editor are to
increase readership and to, as much as possible, increase revenue to
offset the association's expenses.

Lisa Dittrich
Managing Editor
Academic Medicine
Washington,D.C. 20037
lrdittrich@aamc.org (e-mail)