DIGITAL-FIRST PUBLISHING IMPROVES COPYRIGHTS
As the final installment of this blog series on the 10 benefits of medical publishing digital transformation, I think it’s important discuss copyrights. It always seems unfair to me that journals required a transfer of copyrights to them from the authors. In many other instances, a copyright can demand remuneration or is retained by the originator of the work. Until recently authors in medical journals did not really have a choice. However, with the digital transformation of medical journals even the copyright situation is changing. Traditional scientific journal publication embraced a copyright ownership approach which might be considered archaic by today’s standards. During the height of the pandemic, there were calls for increased access to all scientific information. Although not a product of the pandemic, the open access (OA)OA movement got a large “shot in the arm” during this period and continues to grow in popularity and usage. Although many scientific articles are still published in paywall journals, the number of OA articles is dramatically growing in share. Grantors/sponsors prefer OA and many are requiring authors to publish only in OA journals. Publishing OA journals in many cases not only means the article is freely accessible later, but also means the copyright uses a creative commons (CC) license. A CC license is a public copyright that enables the free distribution of an otherwise copyrighted “work.” There are many variations of a CC copyright, but most are used when an author wants to give other people the right to share, use, and build upon a work that the author has created. This new copyright approach is being required by many grantors/sponsors and is rapidly becoming an offering in medical journals that scientific communicators can use to a benefit. The previously restrictive medical journal copyright approach required authors to assign copyright over to the journal thus, limiting the manner in which the article and material could be used by the scientific communicator. With a CC BY license approach, scientific communicators may be able to utilize the article and material in more ways to the advantage of the scientific communication/exchange campaign. However, be wary of journals requiring a CC BY-NC requirement for commercial sponsors. The CC BY-NC license states the article/material can be shared or adapted in any medium or format, as long as the original article is given attribution and it is for a “non-commercial” use. These licenses are essentially pejorative to commercial entities and should be avoided as much as possible by scientific communicators. On the other hand, the least restrictive CC BY with no modifier can be of great advantage as scientific communicators look to extend the scientific communication farther into the community beyond the individual journal audience. Improved copyright is just one of the many benefits offered with the digital transformation of medical publications. To read more benefits, search the back issues of the blog here on this site. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the digital-first publication benefits, please contact us at www.Omni-HC.com or sign up for a free private workshop for your medical affairs organization. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop The next post in the series will discuss the enhanced transparency and data availability available thanks to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your digital transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take the digital transformation survey
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DIGITAL-FIRST PUBLISHING IMPROVES RISK MITIGATION
Throughout this series of blogs, I’ve discussed the digital transformation of medical publishing and how it benefits scientific communications and manuscript development. In this blog we will be talking about how the transformation reduces risk. Many view publications as the hub of scientific communication activities. Often a publication is planned as the leading edge of a more comprehensive scientific communication and exchange campaign. Increased development time and potential target journal rejection are the key drivers of cost, campaign delay and communication ineffectiveness. Target journal selection is a critical element in the scientific communication process. Traditional approaches have focused on limited objective data (impact factor) for use in targeting of journals and certainly no digital opportunities to provide real-time feedback on the ability of any communication to resonate with the audience or community. Although citation-based criteria (e.g., impact factor) and journal reputation remain key considerations for journal selection, there are a growing number of other factors to consider. Thanks to the digital transformation of medical journals, article objectives can be aligned with the proper journal using a much wider basket of criteria including article-level metrics availability, OA, enhanced publication content, plain language summary offerings, speed of publication, and copyright requirements. With these new criteria, scientific communicators can better rank and prioritize target journals and further understand journal rejection risk as it relates to the communication/campaign objectives. Arguably one of the biggest, rejection mitigation is just one of the many benefits offered by the digital transformation of medical publications. Stay tuned as we discuss our 10th benefit in the coming weeks. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the digital-first benefits, please contact us at www.Omni-HC.com or sign up for a free private workshop for your medical affairs organization. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop The next post in the series will discuss copyright opportunities thanks to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your digital transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take the digital transformation survey DIGITAL-FIRST PUBLISHING RESULTS IN BETTER PUBLICATION PLANNING
What are the criteria being used to determine how well a target journal fits with the publication? Many times, it is a conversation determined through the reputation or impact factor of a journal. Unfortunately, these metrics are based on the journal and not on the article or the scientific information it is intended to convey. Almost all medical journals have an online presence nowadays. There are so many choices available to communicate to the audience, it is a question of which of the many channels to use. Medical publications have had to digitally transform to maintain and grow their audience not only in readership but also viewership and overall engagement. Today digital-first medical journals are staying abreast of digital trends and have created new ways, aside from simple text, of communicating science to their audience. A lot of medical communicators work diligently and incur a fair amount of expenses to produce communication/publication plans. Unfortunately, these plans are built around a traditional print process leading to inefficient subjective decisions. Now with the digital transformation of medical publishing, contemporary publication planning is undergoing a dramatic shift to an objective process based on communication objectives, publication metrics, and amplification capabilities. The increased data help ferret out the best journal target to ensure the publication meets its objectives. In addition, with today’s digital publishing, leadership can more easily identify the value of each publication and address potential plan modifications quickly rather than waiting years to receive results for the traditional metric of citations. Contemporary publication planning is just one of many benefits spawned from the digital transformation of medical publications. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the benefits, please contact us at www.Omni-HC.com or sign up for a free private workshop for your medical affairs organization. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop The next post in the series will discuss how when used properly digital first publishing can improve risk mitigation for publication programs. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your digital transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take the digital transformation survey DIGITAL-FIRST PUBLISHING INCREASES SCIENTIFIC UMDERSTANDING
After discussing improved durability of publications in my last blog post, I now want to focus on how the digital transformation of medical journal publishing increases scientific understanding. Many medical journals, such as the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM), have capitalized on the popularity of social media and new forms of publishing medical content (e.g., infographics). Some of NEJM’s digital prominence may have been transitioned from its print days but its editors have aggressively moved to disseminating digital content and building a web of access to its digital properties to keep the audience/community engaged. In fact, Facebook is the fourth biggest driver of link referrals to the NEJM, boosting the journal's presence to over a million ‘likes’ and read rates of over 200,000 views per post. The more actively engaged journals and authors are in spreading the word on an article, the better it is for the goal of disseminating the science and improving outcomes for patients. Digital journal publishing, along with digital communication tools, have opened opportunities to utilize more interactive media and shared the science across specialties, borders, and socioeconomic divides. The wider the readership audience, the better the scientific understanding, now and in the future. Improved scientific understanding is just one of the benefits offered with the digital transformation of medical publications. Stay tuned as we discuss more benefits over the coming weeks. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the digital-first benefits, please contact us at www.Omni-HC.com or sign up for a free private workshop for your medical affairs organization. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop The next post in the series will discuss the enhanced transparency and data availability available thanks to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your digital transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take the digital transformation survey DIGITAL-FIRST PUBLISHING LEADS TO IMPROVED BUSINESS MODELS
In my last blog, I discussed how digital-first publishing allows for better, more precise planning. But the operational benefit of digital publishing goes well beyond just planning to increase the opportunity to improve internal processes. Workflows, processes, and SOPs are all key elements to the efficient functioning of an organization. Carefully created publication development processes make it easier to produce communications to desired audiences. However, print publication development processes are frequently designed as a one-direction process with very little feedback being generated to help improve the communication development process. In the print era, questions about the end user seeing or reading the published article were the domain of expensive journal audits and could only give us a sample of the actual readership. Today’s digita1l-first publishing offers significant insights into the exposed audience and the resonance of the article with the audience. With this improvement of data generation, and process transparency, organizations can improve best practices to drive value through pattern recognition, trend evaluation, and capitalization of data-driven opportunities. Increased data from digital publishing helps scientific communicators to develop data-driven business models and capabilities. Article level data helps improve overall results while aligning processes with organizational objectives, as well as giving actionable ways to achieve overall business goals without crossing compliance boundaries. Improved publication planning and efficient manuscript development are just two of the promises offered from data empowered decision making spawned from the digital transformation of medical publications. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the digital-first benefits, please contact us at www.Omni-HC.com or sign up for a free private workshop for your medical affairs organization. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop The next post in the series will discuss the enhanced transparency and data availability available thanks to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your digital transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take the digital transformation survey DIGITAL-FIRST PUBLISHING LEADS TO IMPROVED DURABILITY FOR PUBLICATIONS
With the transformation to digital-first medical journals, the ability to measure the durability of articles has been significantly increased. The only limitation on digital article durability is the continued archiving of the article on the journal site. Pass-along readership in the digital age continues to be difficult to measure but we can affect it in numerous ways with Open Access and Audience Amplification™ techniques. Historically, HCPs kept their issues of JAMA and New England Journal of Medicine on their office bookshelves and institutions housed them in large medical libraries. To measure a target journal, we would look at prestige, citations, subscription rates, and sometimes pass-along readership. Pass-along readership was an attempt to show how durable a single print journal was inferring articles had the same pass along readership. Of course, the concept and pass-along readership metrics were fraught with the potential for error and rarely considered. Aside from reprint distribution, print age pass along readership was very difficult to effect and the durability of a medical journal article generally was simply the length of time between issues of the host journal. As we mature into the digital-first publication development, article durability should be a key consideration in publication planning. The gains from potentially infinite durability can’t be overstated. At anytime, anywhere around the globe a researcher or clinician with internet can access an article. And, if the article is properly optimized for search engines, it is even easier for those people to find it. Improved durability is just one of the benefits offered from digital transformation of medical publications. Stay tuned as we discuss more benefits over the coming weeks. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the digital-first benefits, please contact us at www.Omni-HC.com or sign up for a free private workshop for your medical affairs organization. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop The next post in the series will discuss the enhanced transparency and data availability available thanks to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your digital transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take the digital transformation survey THE NEW CHANNEL FLEXIBILITY OF MEDICAL JOURNALS
First it was email, then came social media, now we are learning about the metaverse. It all used to be so easy. If you wanted to communicate with someone, you either sent a letter, picked up the phone or met with them in person. Nowadays there are so many choices available to communicate to the audience, it is a question of which of the many channels to use. Medical publications have been digitally transforming to maintain and grow their audience not only in readership but also viewership and overall engagement. Today digital-first medical journals are staying abreast of the digital trends and have created various new ways, aside from simple text, of communicating science to their audience. As the digital native generations become more dominant in the medical and scientific professions, they consume scientific information in a much different manner than their predecessors. According to a pre-COVID survey done by DRG, 46% of healthcare providers (HCPs) age 35 or younger already read articles or abstracts online, compared to at the time only 25% of HCPs age 55 or older. And according to a Veeva survey, due to demographic shifts over 70% of HCPs in the European Union are digital natives and the trend is very similar in the United States. Since the advent of the pandemic, we know these numbers have dramatically increased. To continue to be relevant and attract an audience, digital-first medical publications have been maintaining and growing their audiences with new multimedia approaches. Many medical publications already offer new channels for content consumption to their subscribers/audiences. From video abstracts to interactive data visualizations, publishers are finding new ways to enhance text content with other media on their web environment. The new media also gives authors and sponsors the opportunity to amplify their published articles in entirely new ways. From adding a video graphic embedded into an article to doing a simple video abstract, authors can maximize visibility of their article and deliver better rates of scientific exchange than in the past. Channel flexibility is just one of many benefits spawned from the digital transformation of medical publications. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the benefits, please consider having Omni-HC deliver a free private workshop for your medical affairs organization. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop The next post in the series will discuss the enhanced transparency and data availability available thanks to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your digital transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take the digital transformation survey IMPROVED ACCESS
It is amazing how many facets of our life have been changed due to digital technology. Digital is even changing many aspects of healthcare — from how patients see their healthcare provider to how clinical trials are conducted. Those who don’t evolve with the digital changes will be left behind in a slowly disappearing analog world. In the last few posts of this series I talked about how digital has also changed the medical publishing industry by reshaping how medical professionals engage with published scientific content and access that content. Prior to the digital transformation of medical journals, only those on the circulation list or with library membership could read a journal article limiting access to the scientific data. The digital transformation in medical publishing has opened new avenues to improve access to the communication. Once an article has been published to a journal website, it's indexed and searchable online, regardless if it is a paywall journal (journals that require some form of subscription to view the content) or an open access (OA) journal. With the expansion of OA opportunities in paywall journals, the scientific access for everyone has increased dramatically. Important to increased access is the ability of the digital ecosystem to have links and other mentions of the article elsewhere online, helping to create a “web of access” which makes the article easier to be found. A web of access creates quick links from various parts of the web to your article. Therefore, the potential reader is not limited by their location when searching for information. In the print era of medical journals, the only way your article could make linkage of this nature was through a citation. Although not peer reviewed, backlinks are soft or open citations for each article. Transparency and data are just two of many benefits spawned from the digital transformation of medical publications. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the benefits available, please contact us at www-Omni-HC.com. Every month, we offer a limited number of free private workshops for interested medical affairs organizations to discuss the changing landscape of medical journal publications. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop In the next post I'll discuss the publishing flexibility that is now available, thanks to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your digital transformation progress in context to others in our industry. Click here to take digital transformation survey IMPROVED TRANSPARENCY and ACTIONABLE DATA
By hosting their journal online and publishing articles digitally, medical publishers can now give article-level data never available before, including:
Short of a journal audit, all these resonance metrics were never available in the old print method of publishing. Prior to the digital transformation of medical publishing, medical communicators invariably treated publications as a gateway to disseminating the science through reprints and article redundancy. Today’s improved data and ability to measure article resonance greatly benefits medical communicators. Resonance metrics such as viewership, downloads, time on page, and click generation are extremely helpful in identifying communication success and critical gaps. The ability to dive deeper into data in real-time enables a fuller understanding of the current impact of the scientific exchange and the ability to make a course correction in your publication planning, if necessary. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop In the next post we will discuss the increased access to articles that is now available due to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your Digital Transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take digital transformation survey IMPROVED EFFICIENCY
One of the biggest benefits of the transformation to digital publishing into medical journals has been a dramatic improvement in publishing efficiency. Submissions to journals are now handled through online portals while peer review is expedited by online collaboration and sharing, radically reducing the time to manuscript acceptance. The efficiency continues, as the time between acceptance and publication are all shortened as the industry moved to a digital first versus the old print run publishing model. Efficiency is just one of many benefits spawned from the digital transformation of medical publications. If you are interested in learning more about how you can realize some of the benefits available every month, we offer a limited number of free private workshops for interested medical affairs organizations. Click here to sign up for a Free Workshop In the next post I will discuss the improved transparency and data availability that is now and will be available due to the medical publication digital transformation. In the meantime, please consider participating in our Medical Affairs Digital Transformation Survey. At the end of the survey, you will receive a free benchmarking profile of your Digital Transformation progress in context to others in the industry. Click here to take digital transformation survey |
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April 2022
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