Wednesday, March 6, 2013

NEJM Open Access Round Table

As hours of lecture pass by, I, like most of my fellow students nowadays, will flip through my smart phone to check out facebook, check my email, check facebook again, check what the weather is like today and tomorrow and hope for a nice weekend, and then zone back in to realize I lost 5 minutes of lecture on a critique of a journal article.  As more medical schools emphasize the teaching of evidence based medicine and work into curriculum the appraisal of research articles, the more peculiar I found on my smart phone a discussion we've been having on this blog for a year and a half.

I have an app (free) for the New England Journal of Medicine which provides weekly editions of its articles (again free of charge) and I became engrossed and totally failed to pay attention to the appraisal of a paper discussing dexamethasone to treat bronchiolitis.  (I read the article, from NEJM ironically enough, and it's a solid one, but I digress.)  I failed to pay attention because my app showed me this week's (February 28, 2013 Vol 368, No. 9, pages 785-793) NEJM topic of focus--open science!

I don't want this to become an advertisement for this free app or OSK endorsing NEJM over other publications (they do provide electronic articles free of charge to readers though from my experience).  But there was some fantastic commentary both for and against open access. 

Check out the link.  And I'll try to pay more attention in class.

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