Open Medicine Journal & Blog

Hat-tip and a huge thank you to Gillian for introducing me to the Open Medicine (OM) Journal and Blog.

The blog writer and associate editor of the journal is Dean Giustini, a medical librarian at the University of British Columbia.

Here is an excerpt from one of Dean's introductory blog posts, which gives me several reasons to keep reading today and revisit the blog regularly:

So, why visit OM blog? What are the benefits? First, blogs play a key role in the evolution of the web; they bring people together to share knowledge and to help them learn about new information technologies. We are, after all, in the information age. Furthermore, blogs are increasingly used to support continuing medical education, and viewed as an enhancement to clinical practice and rapid research dissemination. I hope that the OM blog will facilitate open discussion and collaboration, and function as a completely open repository of useful clinical cases and websites.

As a medical librarian, I will also share my thoughts about locating reliable medical information on the Web. In contrast to the original research published in Open Medicine, the blog will highlight interesting or emerging ideas from the blogosphere that are not covered elsewhere - thereby filling an important information gap. Topics I will cover include perspectives on information technologies, health care systems, research funding, drug releases and alerts, health legislation and government policies.

Who will find this blog useful? Physicians, medical students, residents and other health professionals; information professionals such as clinical/ medical librarians and informationists; health consumers and patients who need information about emerging diseases (e.g. SARS), global health issues and important research published elsewhere. (Link)

Open access to scholarly information is a principle I strongly believe in. I've talked about my reasons for blogging in previous posts (#1, #2, #3), but one of them is the desire to freely share new nutrition practice discoveries as well as classic resources because it benefits everyone -- practitioners and the patient/clients we serve.

You can read more about the concept of open access here and more about the Open Access medical journal here.