The BMJ Group’s first dedicated supportive and palliative care journal has launched its new website this month to coincide with the journal’s official release at the COMPASS conference in Edinburgh.

BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care is an important resource for clinicians, researchers and other healthcare workers in all areas where supportive and palliative care is practiced. Published quarterly in print and continuously online, the journal aims to stimulate collaboration between healthcare professionals in different specialities by providing high quality, clinically relevant research, reviews, commentaries, information and news of international importance. more…

This week saw the launch of BMJ Open, a new online journal from the BMJ Group. BMJ Open is fully open access and exists to publish research from across all medical disciplines. It offers authors the option to have their work peer reviewed thoroughly for appropriate methods and transparent reporting, but without judgement being applied about novelty or importance. If after peer review the article is deemed worthy of publication, it will be published and deposited in PubMed Central.

The open access is supported by levying an article processing charge (APC) of £1200 for any accepted article (although discounts and waivers are available).

Innovative features

Among BMJ Open’s firsts for BMJ Group journals is use of the Disqus commenting and rating system, as explained in a previous post. As of April we will be publishing article-level metrics to show article usage.

The journal is also the first in the group to publish reviewers’ comments for accepted articles. Reviewers’ comments and the previous versions of the article that those comments apply to are published alongside the final copy-edited and typeset HTML and PDF versions. This gives credit to reviewers, many of whom play a considerable role in improving papers, as well as providing a more transparent publication process.

Data sharing

How to store and share raw data is one of the hottest topics in publishing at the moment. We are currently working with data curation and publication experts to provide authors with a simple and efficient way of storing their data and linking to it from their article. In particular we are working with the Dryad UK project, part of the UK JISC’s Managing Research Data programme. Watch this space for further developments.

Sharing raw data helps bring the complete research record in to the open. Another way of doing this is through publication of research protocols. We encourage authors to submit their original research protocol with their article, but we will also be publishing protocols themselves, and two were published this week. We will also consider ‘pre-protocols’; innovative study designs yet to receive funding/approval.

To encourage this joined-up approach, authors can publish ‘two articles for the price of one’, by receiving a 50% discount on the APC when the protocol is published and a further 50% discount if they publish the resulting research in BMJ Open.

More information

Trish Groves, editor-in-chief of BMJ Open and deputy editor of the BMJ, explains more about the aims and scope of the journal and its place in the BMJ Group’s open access offerings here; the journal’s first published papers are here and you can submit here.

Naturally the journal has a presence in the blogosphere, on Twitter and on Facebook, so you can let us know what you think, comment on articles and spread the word about the journal or papers that catch your eye.

The BMJ Group’s first dedicated palliative and supportive care journal went live online this week, in preparation for the impending launch in April next year. Check out the new blog site here – https://stg-blogs.bmj.com/spcare/ and show your support by following the journal on Twitter and Facebook.

Introducing BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care

BMJ Supportive and Palliative Care is our newest, peer-reviewed journal with international reach. It aims to link many disciplines and specialties throughout the world; promoting an exchange of evidence based research and innovative practice by publishing high quality transitional research, clinical trials, epidemiology, behavioural sciences, health service research, reviews, and comment.

Following the launch in 2011, BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care will be published quarterly in print and continuously online. It will aim to target not only doctors, but different categories of clinician and healthcare workers associated with palliative medicine, specialist or generalist palliative care, supportive care, psychosocial-oncology and end-of-life care.

The journal’s broad scope makes it a relevant and important resource for palliative care specialists, as well as doctors and nurses in medical and surgical specialties including cardiology, gastroenterology, neurology, oncology, paediatrics, primary care, psychiatry, psychology, renal medicine, respiratory medicine.

A world-class editorial team, which will be lead by Dr Bill Noble, Macmillan senior lecturer in palliative medicine at the University of Sheffield and honorary consultant physician in palliative medicine at Sheffield Teaching Hospitals NHS Foundation Trust, will ensure a high standard of practice-changing research and education.

The new BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care website – scheduled to coincide with the first edition – will play an important role in the overall journal and feature all content ahead of print, as well as offering regular news updates, podcasts, blogs, polls, and eventually, interactive educational features.

Look out for more posts and updates on the BMJ Supportive & Palliative Care blog in the build up to the official launch of the journal at COMPASS, April 2011.

We are delighted to be adding the Journal of Family Planning and Reproductive Health Care to our collection of over 30 specialist journals. Publishing on behalf of the Faculty of Sexual and Reproductive Healthcare of the Royal College of Obstetricians and Gynaecologists, we aim to further develop this title, which currently publishes high-quality research and information relevant to clinical care, service delivery, training and education in the field of contraception and reproductive/sexual health.

Dr Anne Szarewski has been Editor in Chief of the Journal since 2003. She is a Clinical Consultant at Cancer Research UK’s Centre for Epidemiology, Mathematics and Statistics and an Honorary Senior Lecturer at Queen Mary, University of London. In this capacity she manages multi-centre clinical trials of cervical cancer prevention and screening.

The journal has been re-launched with an exciting new look and will be enhanced to provide useful resources and interactive features such as:

• Editor’s choices
• Email alerts
• Top 10 articles
• Online archive

As with our other journals, a Twitter account and Facebook fan page have been created to increase the journal outreach. Please show your support by ‘becoming a fan‘ or ‘following us‘ on Twitter. By doing so, you will receive updates on press coverage, editor’s choices and unlocked articles.

by Anna Sayburn, Senior editor, Best Health, asayburn@bmjgroup.com

How many people know that the BMJ Group’s Evidence Centre produces a high quality, evidence-based health information service, aimed at consumers? Probably not enough, which is one reason we want to make a noise about the newly launched Best Health website. Best Health grew out of the clinical products produced in the Evidence Centre. Originally the website was designed as a ‘translation’ of the Clinical Evidence site, intended for patients to use with their doctors.

The design process

Over recent years, we’ve added a weekly news service, produced podcasts and videos, and written printable summary leaflets for all our in-depth conditions. This new material was sent to our corporate clients for use on their own websites (you may have seen news stories on The Guardian or Boots websites). Until now, we’ve been unable to showcase them on our own site. However, we wanted to do more than add new material. We were aware that the home page had become quite wordy, and the design needed freshening up. We’d also had feedback that some readers found navigation difficult and the structure didn’t always seem logical.

Finally, we’ve spent the last year re-engineering our XML, making it more flexible for customers and allowing us to pull out and highlight different sections of our content as we wished. This meant we needed to rebuild the website anyway, so we took the opportunity to make all the changes we’d long wanted to make. It was the first time I’d worked on a website re-design, and the brief from the technical team was to start from scratch. We began by pulling together all the feedback we’d had from readers about the site design, and the user experience. I reviewed it to find common themes. One surprisingly simple point was that some readers found our basic font too small, and wanted an obvious way of adjusting text size. Others had found themselves in cul-de-sacs, on pages without sufficient navigation to get back to where they’d started from.

We handed all this over to the designers, and I came up with some proposals for wire frames, based on a number of use cases. We then had the job of translating the use cases into user stories for the requirements document, so that the technical team could begin work. We met weekly, thrashing out problems as they arose. Elin Svensson managed the project, ably liaising between the technical team (led by Keith Marshall) and the editors. It was exciting to see the first designs for the site – clean, crisp and with plenty of white space.

The results

Some subtle changes made a great difference to the site. Our ‘further information’ pages, formerly treated as generic sidebars leading off standard pages, can now be grouped together and highlighted in the navigation, allowing us to surface some useful content that had been buried on the previous site. We’ve applied the new group search, which is a massive improvement on our previous search functionality. And not only can we display our news stories; we can now link them to our in-depth information on specific topics, and if you look at a specific condition, you can see the relevant news stories attached. Small changes, but they help the site look up to date and relevant.

I’m particularly pleased that we have a good platform to show our health information videos, which range from how to deal with head lice, to what you can expect after a diagnosis of testicular cancer. We hope that they’ll attract more interest, enabling us to get funding to produce more videos. The site is partially behind a pay wall, for our institutional and individual subscribers. It’s freely available within BMA House, and if BMJ staff would like out of office access, they can contact me for a password.

We hope the site will provide an enhanced experience for existing and future subscribers, and also act as a showcase to demonstrate the breadth and quality of the consumer services we provide at BMJ Group. Do take a look at http://besthealth.bmj.com and let us know what you think.

To build interest in the future launch of BMJ Open, a new open access journal for general medical research, a blog has been created and linked with various Web 2.0 technologies. Not only does the new journal have a blog, Twitter account and Facebook fan page, but all these sites are interconnected to create a seamless and consistent experience for our users. Please show your support by following BMJ_Open on Twitter or liking BMJ Open on Facebook.

What is BMJ Open?

Using a continuous publication model the journal will provide rapid publication for research from any medical discipline or therapeutic area. Not only will the journal publish traditional full research reports, including small or low-impact studies, but we intend to shed light on all stages of the research process by publishing study protocols, pilot studies and pre-protocols. The journal will also place great emphasis on the importance of data sharing; raw data will be linked to at its repository or hosted online as supplementary material wherever possible. As in its sister journal, the BMJ, all research will immediately be open access upon publication.

This emphasis on transparency will continue with research protocols and reviewers’ comments being published alongside final papers. Authors will need to provide clear statements of their studies’ strengths and limitations. Peer review will be open, and the criteria for acceptance will be that the research was conducted in a transparent and ethical way. Naturally, all articles will need to comply with the BMJ Group’s high standards of research and publication ethics.

Authors will be asked to pay article-processing charges on acceptance, although waivers will be available on request. The ability to pay will not influence editorial decisions; payment requests will be made on acceptance.

Watch for updates on the BMJ Open blog (or via Twitter/Facebook) to track the new journal’s progress – and for advance information on how to submit your research. Meanwhile, for more information you can contact the editorial office at editorial.bmjopen@bmjgroup.com.

by Dr Ashley McKimm

This week sees the launch of a new BMJ website to help empower junior doctors to improve the care their patients receive. It recognises that junior doctors often gain a unique insight into healthcare problems and their solutions whilst working on the frontline.

The website, agentsforchange.bmj.com, was launched to support the two ‘Agents for Change’ conferences running this year and hopes to give juniors the tools they need to get their clinical improvement ideas heard.

Earlier this year junior doctors in England were challenged to submit worked templates of how they could improve patient safety. Over 80 submissions were received and the best were presented in a ‘Dragon’s Den’ style event at the ‘Agents for Change’ July patient safety conference in London.

Videos of the pitches, posters and presentations are now available online. It aims to showcase how some junior doctors have created safety improvements in their workplace – often out-innovating the experts – and hopes to encourage others to follow.

Over the summer we’ll be launching a new collaborative forum to allow junior doctors to share their advice, as well as a categorised directory of clinical improvement projects. We’ll be encouraging juniors to use the site for support and to publish their successes online.

On the ‘Agents for Change’ website you’ll also find video presentations and blogs from healthcare experts including Professor Sir Bruce Keogh, Professor James Reason and Professor Chris Ham.

The next conference takes place at The King’s Fund on Wednesday 10 November. We’re inviting a junior doctor and senior manager from each NHS organisation to join us as we improve how we collaborate for quality care.

For junior doctors this is an opportunity to understand the structure of healthcare, learn how to develop a business case, and find out how to ensure your ideas get noticed. To register your interest in attending visit the ‘Events’ section at agentsforchange.bmj.com.

‘Agents for Change’ is developed by junior doctors and supported by the BMJ, Department of Health, King’s Fund, NPSA and NHS Confederation.