Interesting times

David Dehaas

These are interesting times for medical journals in Canada. As readers will already know very well, there are essentially two processes of major change taking place, either one of them sufficient to have turned the medical publishing world upside down.

The first is that the amount of advertising available to pay for printing medical journals has been greatly reduced. The second is that the amount of information available through electronic media is increasing substantially.

We at Canadian Family Physician (CFP) could look at this from a point of view rooted in the past and conclude that traditional medical publishing is in a lot of trouble; or we could look forward and conclude that the opportunities to communicate with our audience have never looked brighter.

Naturally, we take the latter view.

We see the way forward as based on two fundamental principles: first, that in a world awash in information, the future of CFP lies in our service to members of the College of Family Physicians of Canada; and, second, that we can best serve family physicians by making the intellectual property created by our authors, editors, and peer reviewers available in whatever media work best.

We are not cutting back on our commitment to publishing interesting commentaries, hands-on clinical practice articles, and by far the most important family medicine research section in the country.

The timely, practical, and hands-on content is streamed mainly into the print edition; the content that might have a more focused readership, including much of our research, is streamed as Web Exclusives to our website (where searches and cross-connectivity work best); and all content, including ancillary materials, will be published in eCFP, the new digital edition being launched this month (www.cfpc.ca/ecfp/jan10).

Starting with the January 2010 issue, the journal will become a true benefit of College membership, and will be distributed free of charge to members only. All others are invited to subscribe to the print edition. We will, of course, maintain full, free, open access to all content on our website at www.cfp.ca.

As well, we are currently working on several exciting projects, including Mainpro-eligible content in CFP: this will link certain articles in the journal to an interactive node on our website where readers will be able to earn and record Mainpro M1 credits. We expect to launch this in the first quarter.

At the same time, we’re preparing an on-line locum and career ads feature for physicians—free to members of the College—and a mobile-devices version of the journal.

So has medical publishing been turned upside down? Oh, yes. Is it in big trouble? Hardly. We are more than ever looking forward to great things and interesting times.