Open Medicine’s first issue of peer reviewed medical literature is available online. Dean Giustini of UBC Library and the Google Scholar Blog has been a key player in bringing this new publication to life, and writes about it on both his blog, and now the Open Medicine blog as well. The journal was created in response to an editorial fiasco at the Canadian Medical Association Journal, with the intention of removing pharmaceutical industry influence over the production and dissemination of medical information.
Open Medicine is such a great title. It speaks to the need for not just open access to information, but also an open dialogue on how medical information is conceived, constructed, communicated, digested and negotiated. And while the open nature of the Internet provides an opportunity to level the playing field for patients, it is merely the first step to patient empowerment (not that anyone at OM has made an argument for technological utopianism). Pearl Jacobson notes in Partnership: the Canadian Journal of Library and Information Practice and Research, power dynamics between patients and physicians are a key aspect to whether access to information will translate into actual patient empowerment on the ground.
Any open dialogue in the health library field that discusses what it means to ‘open medicine’ would best include a look at the term ‘consumer’. Does a term with free market connotations belong in the discourse of a public system? ‘Consumer’ suggests that patients have free will and ultimate control within the physician-patient encounter, which according to Jacobson’s review is often not the case for a myriad of reasons. Recently on the PLG listserv, there was some excellent discussion and commentary on how language that expresses capitalist values and norms are not transferable to the field of librarianship. The term ‘customer’ was used on the CHLA listserv recently, and while I’m not familiar with the context from which it originated, it made me uneasy. Is there room for open dialogue on this subject in health libraries? What are the implications of a discourse that involves ‘consumerizing’ health information?
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June 8 | 2007
Excellent article discussing Open Medicine, and the issues in medical publishing in general.
via Becky at the Clinical Evidence, Searching Tidbits and other Minutiae Blog
-PC-