The profile of general practitioners (GPs) who publish in selected family practice journals

Background: Providing support for research is one of the key issues in the ongoing attempts to improve Primary Care. However, when patient care takes up a significant part of a GP's time, conducting research is difficult. In this study we examine the working conditions and profile of GPs who publish in three leading medical journals and propose possible remedial policy actions. Findings: The authors of all articles published in 2006 and 2007 in three international Family Medicine journals - Annals of Family Medicine, Family Practice, and Journal of Family Practice - were contacted by E-mail. They were asked to complete a questionnaire investigating the following variables: availability of specific time for research, time devoted to research, number of patients attended, and university affiliation. Only GPs were included in the study. Three hundred and ten relevant articles published between 2006 and 2007 were identified and the authors contacted using a survey tool. 124 researchers responded to our questionnaire; 45% of respondents who were not GPs were excluded. On average GPs spent 2.52 days per week and 6.9 hours per day on patient care, seeing 45 patients per week. Seventy-five per cent of GPs had specific time assigned to research, on average 13 hours per week; 79% were affiliated to a university and 69% held teaching positions. Conclusions: Most GPs who publish original articles in leading journals have time specifically assigned to research as part of their normal working schedule. They see a relatively small number of patients. Improving the working conditions of family physicians who intend to investigate is likely to lead to better research results.

¿Favorece la publicación en abierto el impacto de los artículos científicos? Un estudio empírico en el ámbito de la medicina intensiva

Peer-reviewed

Use and users of electronic journals at Catalan universities: the results of a survey

Es presenten els resultats d’una enquesta sobre l’ús de revistes electròniques realitzada al professorat de les universitats que formen el Consorci de Biblioteques Universitàries de Catalunya (CBUC). Els resultats mostren un elevat grau de coneixement de la col·lecció de revistes electròniques entre el personal docent i investigador i una creixent preferència pel format electrònic en detriment de l’imprès. L’alt grau de coneixement i d’ús dels títols electrònics, i la preferència per aquest suport, comporten una elevada valoració de la col·lecció de revistes electròniques. Al mateix temps, la major part dels usuaris preveu un increment de l’ús dels títols electrònics durant els propers anys. Els resultats també confirmen la importància de la disciplina i de l’edat com a factors explicatius de l’ús de les revistes electròniques.

Milk, from medicine to food Mediterranean Europe: Catalonia, 19th-20th centuries

The spread of milk consumption was a significant change in the diet of Europeans, however it is one that has not been greatly studied with regard to the populations of Mediterranean Europe. In this article we shall analyse the ain circumstances that conditioned that process in Catalonia between the middle of the 19th century and 1936. In our study we shall argue that the consumption of milk in this area was only relevant in the 19th century in situations of illness or old age, and that it subsequently increased and acquired a new significance as a result of various factors. In particular, we shall emphasise: (a) the scientific advances in microbiology and nutrition, (b) the activities carried out by doctors and various public institutions to promote the consumption of fresh milk, and (c) the technological innovations in the milk producing sector. In Appendix 1 we show two maps representing the main territorial references that we shall mention.

How collaboration could contribute to make Catalan journals visible on the Internet?

Cooperation between libraries is a universal language spoken in different dialects. In 1996 the libraries of the state-funded universities and the National Library of Catalonia (Spain) formed the Consortium of Academic Libraries of Catalonia (CBUC) to act as a channel for cooperation. The organization and activities of CBUC are an example of how this universal language has been adapted to the specific characteristics of the Libraries of Catalonia. Catalonia is an autonomous region of Spain with 7 million inhabitants with its own language, history and traditions and with a strong feeling of own identity that facilitates the cooperation. Thanks to this (and also to the hard work of the member libraries), since then, CBUC has created a union catalogue, an interlibrary lending program, the Digital Library of Catalonia, a cooperative store, different cooperatives repositories and other cooperation programs. One of these cooperatives repositories is RACO (Catalan Journals in Open Access, www.raco.cat) where can be consulted, in open access, the full-text articles of scientific, cultural and scholar Catalan journals. The main purpose of RACO is to increase the visibility and searches of the journals included and to spread the scientific and academic production published in Catalonia. This purpose makes specific in three aims: encourage the electronic edition of Catalan journals; be the interface that allows the whole search of all the journals and provide the instruments for its preservation. There are currently 244 journals in RACO, that includes more than 85.000 articles (80% in OA) from 50 publishing institutions. Since it got into operation it has had more than 4 millions of queries. These 244 journals offer the full-text of all the published issues. Nevertheless, some journal can have a delay between the introduction of the table of contents and the full-text for the recent issues. From 2005 we have a plan of retrospective digitization that has allowed to digitize more than 350.000 pages of back issues. The RACO repository works with the open source program OJS (Open Journal Systems, http://pkp.sfu.ca/ojs/) and uses Dublin Core Metadata and the interoperability protocol created by Open Archives Initiative (OAI) which allows to increase the visibility of the articles published in journals offering oneself together with other international repositories.

Preventive medicine for epidemic outbreaks and risky behavior through mobile devices and ubiquitous computing

In this work, we have developed the first free software for mobile devices with the Android operating system that can preventively mitigate the number of contagions of sexually transmitted infections (STI), associated with risk behavior. This software runs in two modes. The normal mode allows the user to see the alerts and nearby health centers. The second mode enables the service to work in the background. This software reports the health risks, as well as the location of different test centers.

Use and availability of scholarly journals in Catalan academic libraries

This paper presents the results of a survey of academics affiliated to the universities that are members of the Consortium of Academic Libraries of Catalonia (CBUC), and an analysis of the availability in the libraries of these universities, of the references cited in a sample of articles published by these academics. The results reflect the major importance that researchers assign to scholarly journals as the main source of scientific information. Most state that they use electronic journals either exclusively or in any case more than print journals, a preference that is higher among younger scholars. With regard to frequency of reading, four out of ten researchers state that they read journals virtually every day, while nine out of ten report that they do so at least once a week. Scholars claim that the obstacles they face when trying to download an article are related to the lack of subscriptions. However, the availability study showed that most of the articles cited in their publications are available at least at one of the CBUC libraries. Though most researchers keep a copy of the articles they consult, just over a third of them use some kind of reference management software.

Medicine and Science in a New Medical-surgical Context: The Royal College of Surgery of Barcelona (1760–1843)

Taking the Royal College of Barcelona (1760 -1843) as a case study this paper shows the development of modern surgery in Spain initiated by Bourbon Monarchy founding new kinds of institutions through their academic activities of spreading scientific knowledge. Antoni Gimbernat was the most famousinternationally recognised Spanish surgeon. He was trained as a surgeon at the Royal College of Surgery in Cadiz and was later appointed as professor of theAnatomy in the College of Barcelona. He then became Royal Surgeon of King Carlos IV and with that esteemed position in Madrid he worked resiliently to improve the quality of the Royal colleges in Spain. Learning human bodystructure by performing hands-on dissections in the anatomical theatre has become a fundamental element of modern medical education. Gimbernat favoured the study of natural sciences, the new chemistry of Lavoisier and experimental physics in the academic programs of surgery. According to the study of a very relevant set of documents preserved in the library, the so-called “juntas literarias”, among the main subjects debated in the clinical sessions was the concept of human beings and diseases in relation to the development of the new experimental sciences. These documents showed that chemistry andexperimental physics were considered crucial tools to understand the unexplained processes that occurred in the diseased and healthy human bodyand in a medico-surgical context. It is important to stress that through these manuscripts we can examine the role and the reception of the new sciences applied to healing arts.

Knowledge management for systems biology a general and visually driven framework applied to translational medicine

Background: To enhance our understanding of complex biological systems like diseases we need to put all of the available data into context and use this to detect relations, pattern and rules which allow predictive hypotheses to be defined. Life science has become a data rich science with information about the behaviour of millions of entities like genes, chemical compounds, diseases, cell types and organs, which are organised in many different databases and/or spread throughout the literature. Existing knowledge such as genotype - phenotype relations or signal transduction pathways must be semantically integrated and dynamically organised into structured networks that are connected with clinical and experimental data. Different approaches to this challenge exist but so far none has proven entirely satisfactory. Results: To address this challenge we previously developed a generic knowledge management framework, BioXM™, which allows the dynamic, graphic generation of domain specific knowledge representation models based on specific objects and their relations supporting annotations and ontologies. Here we demonstrate the utility of BioXM for knowledge management in systems biology as part of the EU FP6 BioBridge project on translational approaches to chronic diseases. From clinical and experimental data, text-mining results and public databases we generate a chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) knowledge base and demonstrate its use by mining specific molecular networks together with integrated clinical and experimental data. Conclusions: We generate the first semantically integrated COPD specific public knowledge base and find that for the integration of clinical and experimental data with pre-existing knowledge the configuration based set-up enabled by BioXM reduced implementation time and effort for the knowledge base compared to similar systems implemented as classical software development projects. The knowledgebase enables the retrieval of sub-networks including protein-protein interaction, pathway, gene - disease and gene - compound data which are used for subsequent data analysis, modelling and simulation. Pre-structured queries and reports enhance usability; establishing their use in everyday clinical settings requires further simplification with a browser based interface which is currently under development.

Derivation of human embryonic stem cells at the center for regenerative medicine in Barcelona

We report here the legislative issues related toembryo research and human embryonic stem cell (hESC)research in Spain and the derivation of nine hESC lines atthe Center of Regenerative Medicine in Barcelona. You canfind the information for obtaining our lines for researchpurposes at blc@cmrb.eu.

Bundling electronic journals and competition among publishers

Site licensing of e-journals has been revolutionizing the way academicinformation is distributed. However, many librarians are concerned aboutthe possibility that publishers might abuse site licensing by practicingbundling. In this paper, we analyze the private and social incentives forthe publishers to use bundling in the context of STM electronic journalmarket. In the short run in which the number of journals is exogenouslygiven, we find a strong conflict between the two incentives: each publisherfinds bundling optimal and bundling increases the industry profit butreduces social welfare. However, in the long run we find that publishersmight have higher incentives to introduce new journals under bundlingthan without bundling and, in this case, bundling can reduce the industryprofit while increasing social welfare. Finally, we examine publishers incentive to provide links to the websites of the rival publishers underbundling and show that even asymmetric publishers have incentive tointerconnect.

The pricing of academic journals: A two-sided market perspective

More and more academic journals adopt an open-access policy, by which articlesare accessible free of charge, while publication costs are recovered through authorfees. We study the consequences of this open access policy on a journal s qualitystandard. If the journal s objective was to maximize social welfare, open accesswould be optimal as long as the positive externalities generated by its diffusionexceed the marginal cost of distribution. However, we show that if an open accessjournal has a different objective (such as maximizing readers payoffs, the impactof the journal or its profit), it tends to choose a quality standard below the sociallyefficient level.

Electronic journals, scholarly communication and libraries

The recent surge in scientific electronic journals began when libraries began having access to the WWW in the mid-1990s. The shift from paper to digital has affected the traditional alignment and role of the primary "stakeholders" -mainly authors, publishers, universities and libraries. The author offers a brief review of the history of the scholarly journal followed by the evolution of e-journals in during the past two decades. The article then focuses on the implications that these have had on traditional library processes and services such as selection, acquisitions, cataloguing, storage, preservation and user services. In the conclusion the author speculates on the long term effect of Web-based publishing on the format of the traditional scholarly journal as it has existed for over 300 years.

A qualitative study of the impact of electronic journals on scholarly information behavior

A qualitative study of the impact of electronic journals on the information behavior of academics at Catalan universities shows that academics now read more, and more widely. However, their reading is becoming more superficial; they are compelled to improve their discrimination skills in order to decide what to read in more depth. The electronic accessibility of journals means that academics now make fewer library visits. Web browsing and TOC e-mail alerts are replacing physical browsing, and searching is a very popular option for keeping up to date with developments. Internet search engines, especially Google and Google Scholar, are becoming important sources of information for academics. However, they face problems in managing their personal scientific information.

Authors', Institutions' and Countries' rankings in regional and urban science : an analysis for nine top international journals from 1991 to 2000

This paper examines the most productive authors, institutions and countries in regional and urban science from 1991 to 2000 using information on published articles (and pages) from a sample of widely recognized journals in this field: ARS, JUE, JRS, IJURR, IRSR, PRS, RSUE, RS and US. We also consider the relation between the country of the institution named in articles and the country in which the journal is published, in order to know if there are a home publication bias in regional and urban science. Analysis was made for the whole decade and by subperiods, this allowed us to make a more dynamic interpretation of the results