Moving beyond journals: the future arrives with a crash
BMJ 1999; 318 doi: https://doi.org/10.1136/bmj.318.7199.1637 (Published 19 June 1999) Cite this as: BMJ 1999;318:1637Data supplement
Eprint server: features
General points
• Freestanding website, independent of other BMJ Publishing Group activities
• Will not have facilities for peer review, although visitors' comments will be recordable
• Copyright to be retained by the author
• Free, open to all
• Disclaimers will be displayed on entering the site and at the top of each article. They will read something like:
Warning: This article has not yet been accepted for publication by a peer reviewed journal. It is posted here mainly for the benefit of fellow researchers. Casual readers should not act on its findings and be wary of reporting them.
Scope
Clinical medicine and health research
Article submission
• Will entail registration
• Authors entirely responsible for the process
• Formats restricted to text and HTML
• Temporary holding bay to allow minimal scrutiny (for libel, obscenity, breach of patient confidentiality, blatant self advertisement, etc)
• Resubmissions: previous versions and comments retained; latest version shown
• Once posted, articles can be retracted but not removed from the server
• Authors to categorise articles according to topic
Searching
• By authors, dates, keywords etc
• Also by filters, yet to be defined
Submission to peer reviewed publication
Authors will be able to activate submission to the journal of their choice. The server will provide lists of journals (with their instructions to authors) which, by policy, will consider preprints for submission.
Once the peer reviewed article has been published elsewhere, the author can link to the ultimate destination.
Timescale
We expect that the server will be operational by September-October 1999. Progress reports will be available from here.
The defects of medical journals
I developed this list of the defects of medical journals for a talk I gave to the Harveian Society entitled "A Requiem for Medical Journals." I intercut the talk with extracts from Verdi's Requiem and gave evidence to support each assertion. Much of the evidence can be found in the new book Peer Review in Health Care, edited by Fiona Godlee and Tom Jefferson (BMJ Books, 1999. ISBN 0-7279-1181-3).—Richard Smith
1. Make doctors feel guilty
2. Too many of them
3. Nobody reads many of them
4. Too boring
5. Too pompous
6. Too establishment
7. Too awful to look at
8. Don't meet information needs
9.Too much rubbish
10.Too hard work to access
11. Not relevant
12. Too much duplication
13. Don't change practice
14. Too concerned with authors rather than readers
15. Slow every thing down
16. Too biased
17. Anti-innovatory
18. Too wasteful of academic time
19. Can't cope with fraud
20. Too corrupt
21.Too expensive
22. Rip off authors
23. Don't add value
24. Don't reach the developing world
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