Wednesday, September 1, 2010

Publication of Laboratory Quality Literature

I did a "Pub Med" search (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed) today to see what I could find about recent publication of articles of interest to the laboratory qualitologist.  Using a search of (Medical Laboratory OR Clinical Laboratory) AND (Quality Management) AND (English language) AND 2010-to-date, I came up with 140 articles. 
A few observations.  The variety of articles present was broad and involved accreditation, proficiency, utilization, medical information systems, ECG reading interpretations, quality cost, and quality control articles, plus, plus plus.  So there is a RICH load of Quality literature.  A quick glimpse of the journals in which the manuscripts were found was equally rich and varied.  There were 4 articles in one journal, but otherwise on a quick examination I didn't find any other duplications.
So it is fair to say that many of us are interested in publishing, and there are lots of journals that are interested in receiving and publishing our manuscripts.
So this is all good.

But let me temper this with some of the darker side.  My access to Pub Med gives me University free  access to full articles, but even with this I could get access to only about 40 percent of the manuscripts.  Access to many manuscripts cost $40 dollars or more.  Having access to an abstract only is rarely of value. 
So while there is lots available, we still have challenges in getting access to all this valuable information.

I don't have a solution, at least not one that would satisfy many copyright lawyers, but one possible solution would be for blog folks or web-sites to provide access to people that want to precis manuscripts that they find interesting and valuable, giving all the appropriate credit where credit is due. 

It is a new world we live in and many of the old rules for communication are being challenged.  This is a good thing.

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