Issues in Electronic Research Publishing: Implications for Occupational Health Care

Abstract

S ignificant disparity exists b~twee~the efficie~cy .of scientific research and the meffic1ency of sc1ent1fic reporting. Approximately 10% of ~esearch reports are published within 5 months fr~m the time they are submitted to a journal for peer review (Robertson, 2001). To rectify this significant delay in reporting in 1999, Harold Varmus, former director of the U.S. National Institute of Health (NIH), proposed to create a global electronic publishing (e-publishing) effort spanning all of the biomedical sciences (E-Biomed) (Butler, 1999). The aim was to make new scientific findings centrally available at the earliest possible time to the widest audience of investigators and public health consumers. The new system would make results from the global life science research community available at little or no cost on the Internet.What Varmus intended to be E-Biomed instead became PubMedCentral (PMC) (PMC, 1999), whose purpose is to, free of charge, archive, organize, and distribute peer reviewed reports from journals as well as reports that are screened, but not formally peer reviewed. PubMedCentral operated by the National Center for Biotechnology Information, a division of the U.S. National Library of Medicine, offers free, unrestricted access to life science journal literature. Although PMC is not a publisher, participation by publishers in PMC is voluntary.

Publishing on the Web

“…Opportunities include tapping into the new online venues using the interactive capabilities of Web 2.0 technology, which may change publishing practices in ways we cannot now imagine (Cohen, 2010). In the meantime, nurse scholars are challenged not only to keep abreast of current trends in Web publication and understand the creative implications of those trends for their areas of interest (e.g., Thomas, 2003), but also to actively participate in the development of electronic publishing.…”