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In This Issue:
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Director's Message: The Brave New World of Scholarly Publishing: Not for the Faint of Heart!
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"Where should I publish this?" It is a question often asked aloud or muttered quietly by colleagues working on a manuscript. Often, the answer is a short list of most likely journals, and adjusted in terms of the intended audience, methodology and scope of the study. With the advent of open-access digital publishing, there are now many more options for scholarly publishing. Open access (OA) is a publication model based on free and unrestricted access to published scholarship in contrast to the more familiar subscription-based model. As of October 2015 there were over 10,500 open access journals. The advantages of open access publishing are the increased visibility of scholarship and increased citation
rate for OA publications. OA publishing has a number of implications for faculty. Of the 1.5 million scholarly articles published each year, about 7% are now OA articles and this will only increase. But along with more choice comes more questions and in some cases, more confusion.
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Figure 1: Article volume growth for major Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) member publishers
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The most common model for OA publishing is based on article processing charges, frequently paid by authors or their institutions using grant funds, professional development funds or paid out-of-pocket by the authors. These fees currently average $900 and can be as high as $3000. There are more hybrid journals now where authors are given the choice when the paper is accepted for publication to keep it as on a subscription-only basis or pay an article processing fee to make it freely available. It is increasingly common to receive manuscript solicitations from OA journals, many of which are new, but unknown. These new OA journals face a certain degree of skepticism given the documented predatory practices of some publishers. The worst of the bunch offer journals with little or no peer-review standards and often are journals that are not indexed in PubMed or other bibliographic indexes. A recent report somewhat hopefully concludes that "while these journals pose a potential threat to the reputation of professional OA publishing, they have very little impact on the actual scholarly literature compared to the amount of spam e-mail they generate (p. 22)."
So what can you do to learn more about these issues? There are a number of helpful resources available to you-some very close to home. As always, the CHM health sciences librarian is a good starting point (Iris Kovar-Gough). Iris is very knowledgeable about these issues: she can answer your questions and point you in the right direction. The MSU library also has a resource page to learn more about OA publishing, including links to other sites that could be helpful. Another excellent resource, especially for separating the OA e-mail spam from the reputable journals, is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The DOAJ is an online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals; it contains information on more than 10000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities. DOAJ is a membership organization; member journals are committed to quality, peer-reviewed open access. We have more publishing options than ever before, which makes for opportunity and for confusion. Take advantage of the opportunities and seek information in the face of confusion.
Brian Mavis, PhD
Professor
Director, Office of Medical Education Research and Development
Director, CHM Learning Academy
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- How to Develop a Curriculum
OMERAD will again offer the blended course titled How to Develop a Curriculum early next semester. If you are responsible for designing and developing instruction for the Shared Discovery Curriculum, this course is for you! You will need to have a clear idea for a short curriculum, such as a course, rotation, intersession, etc., and have the content expertise for it.
This distance course, led by Deborah Sleight, PhD, and John Williamson, MA, is a blend of online didactic information with weekly individual phone or videoconference meetings with the instructors and three group videoconference meetings with the other participants. Participants complete worksheets each week.
One previous participant commented:
The instructors were the true joy of this course, encouraging and instructive, helpful yet holding us accountable. Makes me want to complete a full curriculum, not just for myself, but also so I can continue working in such a supportive, positive environment, producing a work of worth.
The course will begin on February 1st, 2016 and will run through March 21st. There is space for up to eight participants. For more information about this course or to register for it, please email your name, department, and phone number to [email protected].
- AAMC Virtual Medical Education Event January 8, 2016
The newest option in the AAMC's medical education catalogue is a learning opportunity designed specifically for early to mid-career medical educators, faculty, administrators, and medical school staff. The Virtual Medical Education Event will present innovations in medical education and career-advancing strategies via a virtual experience. For more information, please visit: aamc.org/virtualmeded
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B-CLR: Strategies for Medical Educators to Collaborate, Innovate and Disseminate at a Distance
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This past November I had the opportunity to attend, present and share with a diverse group of medical educators at the Generalists in Medical Education annual meeting. One of the workshops I attended at the conference focused on new strategies for medical educators to collaborate, innovate, and disseminate at a distance. During the workshop session, speakers demonstrated an array of different integrated technology platforms and brought together two different teams of people from remote locations to interact with the live conference audience. As a group, they shared and discussed strategies they have used successfully to collaborate in the development of projects leading to scholarly presentations, and publications. This innovative group of medical educators put their own work to the test in front of a live audience with all the challenges and rewards that comes with it. It was a very interactive and lively session.
As a benefit to the audience members attending the session, and as part of their ongoing collaboration and research; the group put together and shared with the audience an excellent resource guide containing descriptions and links to helpful instructional resources accessible in various formats. With the authors' permission, I have included their resource guide in this publication. This brief guide can be used as a reference for faculty seeking new ways to collaborate at a distance with students and faculty within our own distributed medical school model, or across other medical schools.
Topics addressed in the resource guide include:
- Communication and information sharing
- Backchannel
- File storage & repositories
- Scheduling
- Social citation managers
- Discussion & communities
- Social networking
- Collaborative inquiry
- Brainstorming & affinity diagramming
- Collaborative work spaces
- Concept & Mind maps
- Note taking
- Virtual whiteboards
- Virtual conferencing and presenting
- Synchronous conferencing (Bidirectional audio)
Click here to access the resource guide. In addition to the resource listed above, OMERAD has also put together a list of resources for medical education research and scholarship
to support faculty in medical education scholarship. The resource list makes reference to published papers and also includes links to websites and documents. Resources are arranged by topic, addressing issues common to educational scholarship, including definitions of scholarship, formulating resource questions, methodology and research design as well as dissemination via poster or publication. Access the OMERAD resource list here.
Geraud Plantegenest, MA Manager, Blended Curricular Learning Resources (B-CLR) Office of Medical Education Research and Development
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- Miller R, Mavis BE, Lloyd JW, Grabill CM, Henry RC & Patterson CC. The association of perceived stress, self-confidence and learning environment with the self-esteem of veterinary medical students. Journal of Veterinary Medical Education. 2015; 42(4): 353-363.
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An interactive gallery featuring examples of CHM blended and online learning projects by B-CLR.
Resources are arranged by topic, addressing issues common to educational scholarship, including definitions of scholarship, formulating resource questions, methodology and research design as well as dissemination via poster or publication.
A medical education listserv maintained by OMERAD.
Peer-reviewed international open access journal for disseminating information on the education and training of physicians and other health care professionals.
Click on the link to view past issues of our newsletter.
Medical Education Scholarship Group
Meets first Wednesday of each month in room A116 East Fee Hall (East Lansing) and 451 Secchia Center (Grand Rapids) from 1:30 pm to 3:00 pm. The purpose is to develop and support scholarship related to our educational program. Got an idea? Need an inspiration? Looking for collaborators? Join us! For questions about this group contact Dr. Brian Mavis: [email protected].
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A-202 East Fee Hall 965 Fee Road East Lansing, Michigan 48824 | 517-353-2037 | E-mail | Website
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