Task force of the European Federation of medical informatics journals: background, rationale and purpose.

CONFLICT OF INTEREST: NONE DECLARED The paper presents an analysis of how EFMI disseminates new knowledge and of the active medical informatics journals in EFMI member countries, which was carried out as an outcome of the EFMI Council meetings in London in 2008, Sarajevo in 2009 and Antalya in 2009 . The analysis identifies eight active major informatics journals and several other publications. Most are subscription-based and published at least quarterly. There is a possibility for the editors to meet regularly and form a community of practice with the aim of further improving their effectiveness in disseminating new knowledge and best practice in medical informatics. It is feasible to share expertise and it may be possible to harmonise several aspects of preparation and submission of manuscripts so that some of the identified barriers in publishing are reduced.

1. INTRODUCTION

The European Federation for Medical Informatics (EFMI) is a non-profit scientific and professional organization established in 1976 that today consists of 31 national members [1-4]. All European countries are entitled to be represented in EFMI by an appropriate national medical informatics society. The term ‘medical informatics’ is used to include the whole spectrum of health informatics and all its sub-disciplines and allied disciplines. The Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) defines medical informatics as [4, 5]: ‘The field of information science concerned with the analysis and dissemination of medical data through the application of computers to various aspects of health care and medicine.’ This definition was introduced in 1987 as a MeSH term.

EFMI operates with a minimum of bureaucratic overhead with each national society supporting the federation by sending a representative to participate in the council. English has been adopted as the official language, although simultaneous translation is often provided for congresses in non-English speaking countries [6]. EFMI has 16 working groups: Smart Cards in Health Care ‘CARDS’; Social Security and Welfare; Education in Health Informatics ‘EDU’; Electronic Health Records ‘EHR’; Evaluation and Assessment of Health Information Systems ‘EVAL’; Informatics for Disabled People and Rehabilitation ‘IDR’; Information Planning and Modelling in Health Care ‘IPAM’; Libre/Free and Open Source Software ‘LIFOSS’; Case-mix and Severity of Cases; Medical Informatics in Transition Countries ‘MICIT’; Medical Imaging Processing ‘MIP’; Natural Language Understanding ‘NLU’; Nursing Informatics in Europe ‘NURSIE’; Human and Organisational Factors of Medical Informatics ‘HOFMI’; Primary Care Informatics ‘PCI’; Safety, Security and Ethics ‘SSE’; and Traceability ‘TRA’.

To date, EFMI has organized 21 European congresses of medical informatics, including the Medical Informatics Europe (MIE) congresses in Cambridge (1978), Berlin (1979), Oslo (1988), Glasgow (1990), Vienna (1991), Jerusalem (1993), Lisbon (1994), Copenhagen (1996), Thessaloniki (1997), Ljubljana (1999), Hannover (2000), Budapest (2002), St. Malo (2003), Geneva (2005), Maastricht (2006), Gothenburg (2008) and Sarajevo (2009). The MIE 2011 conference will be held in Oslo. Traditionally, MIE conferences were not held in the year in which the International Medical Informatics Association (IMIA) organises its triennial conference MEDINFO [1]. EFMI has also started a new series of meetings: the Special Topic Conferences (STCs). The STC concept has the following components: a) organization should be done by a member society possibly in combination with its annual meeting; b) EFMI Council meeting should be the integral part of STC; c) topic of the conference should be defined by the organizing member society; d) considering the topic, the relevant EFMI working groups should be engaged; e) contributions should be mostly by invitation; f) STCs are small 2-day conferences with 100+ participants.

The first conference STC took place in Bucharest/Romania 2001, then in Nicosia/Cyprus 2002, Rome/Italy 2003, Munich/Germany 2004, Athens/Greece 2005, Timisoara/Romania 2006, Brijuni/Croatia 2007, London/United Kingdom 2008, and Antalya/Turkey 2009. In 2010, the STC will take place in Rejkjavik/Iceland, and in 2011 in Ptuj/Slovenia. The proceedings of these conferences were usually published by Springer in the series ‘Lecture Notes in Medical Informatics’ and by IOS Press in the series ‘Studies in Health Technologies and Informatics’. A selection of the best papers from the MIE conferences were published in a special volume of the International Journal of Medical Informatics and will be published in the Methods of Information in Medicine, while the special proceedings of STCs is published by IOS Press as collection of peer reviewed articles.

2. REVIEW OF MEDICAL INFORMATICS JOURNALS IN EUROPE

Medical informatics scientific and research production in Europe is growing both in quantity and quality. Promoting high-quality research is a major goal of EFMI [1, 4, 6]. EFMI has two highly respected official general journals, the International Journal of Medical Informatics (former title: International Journal of Bio-Medical Computing), currently edited by Charles Safran and Jan Talmon, and Methods of Information in Medicine, currently edited by Reinhold Haux. EFMI also publishes several sub-speciality official journals covering the spectrum of medical informatics sub-disciplines. The time-honoured method to disseminate high-quality scientific research is via the proceedings of the MIE annual conference. EFMI also plays a major role in education and in the harmonization of medical informatics sub-disciplines through the organization of STCs. Both MIE and STC proceedings are peer reviewed and published by IOS Press (Amsterdam, The Netherlands). Usually, MIE proceedings are indexed in Medline/PubMed. Most medical informatics journals are published in local languages, but many of them also incorporate English summaries or contain combined articles published in domestic and English language. Altogether, EFMI provides highly effective means for worldwide dissemination of medical informatics research conducted in Europe. However, in addition to the proceedings, journal editors have the opportunity to do more to disseminate knowledge and increase the understanding of our discipline.

3. ANALYSIS OF PUBLISHING ACTIVITIES WITHIN EFMI MEMBERS

Most of the information about the EFMI can be found on the official website (www.efmi.org). Furthermore, most of national societies have their own websites providing useful information about publications and meetings in EFMI member countries. Our analysis is based on the facts generated from EFMI database stored on EFMI website and collected from national representatives of EFMI member countries.

A search of Medline with the search terms ‘EFMI’ and ‘European Federation for Medical Informatics’ returns only 21 papers – 18 in medical informatics related journals: Informatics in Primary Care (6), International Journal of Medical Informatics (3), Methods of Information in Medicine (2), Studies in Health Technologies (6); and 3 in non-informatics/non-EFMI journals. Authors of the papers are: Blobel (2), De Lusignan (6), France (1), Horsch (1), McKeon (1), Masic (2), Michalas (2), Naszlady (1), Tallberg (1), Talmon (1), Trpisovský (1), van Goor (1), and Zvarova (1). Medline search using the term ‘IMIA’ was performed (for comparison) and 150 papers were found; the search term ‘AMIA’ resulted in 244 papers found. Most of EFMI papers are related to the activities of working groups – PCI is the most prominent [5, 6] – and relatively few initiatives at the level of the federation. Detailed analysis of EFMI website showed that only 14 of 31 members have their official scientific or professional medical informatics journal or newsletter listed (Table 1). Medical informatics journals have their articles published in English with three published in their national language. There are three journals published only as e-journals.

Table 1.

EFMI member countries medical informatic journalsFinanced

EFMI COUNTRY	Journal title	Publisher	Editor-in-Chief	Established in	Issues per year	Submission	Website	Language	Field (MI or/and other)	Peer reviewed	Financed by
Austria	Artificial Intelligence in Medicine	Elsevier	Klaus-Peter Adlassnig	1989 ISSN 1386-5056	9	email	yes	English	MI and other	international	subscription
Bosnia and Herzegovina	Acta Informatica Medica	AVICENA, Sarajevo	Izet Masic	1993 ISSN 0353-8109	4	email	yes	English	MI and other	international	subscription
Croatia	Bilten HDMI (Bulletin of the CSMI)	CSMI	Knstina Fišter	1992 ISSN 1330-0253 1993	2 bi-English	email	yes	English/Croatian	MI and other	no national	membership in the society ministry of science/publicity
Czech Republic	Lékař a Technika European Journal for Biomedical Informatics	SBMILI EuroMISE	Karel Roubik Jana Zvarova	1970 ISSN 0301-5491 2005 ISSN 1801-5603	4 2	email	yes yes	Czech English +other	MI and biomedical engineering biomedical informatics	national international	public institutions/subscription other
Denmark	newsletter	DSMI	-	-	-	-	yes	Danish/English	MI	national	public institutions
France	Informatique et Sante	Springer-Verlag	Patrice Degoulet	-	2	email	yes	French/English	MI	national	public institutions/subscription
Ireland	Newsletter
Israel	ILAMI journal and The Health Screen	-	-	-	2	-	-	-	MI and other	-	-
Slovenia	Informatica Medica Slovenica	SMIA	Gaj Vidinar	1993 ISSN 1318-2129 (print) ISSN 1318-2145 (electronic)	2	email	yes	English/Slovenian/other	MI, biostatistics and other	international/national	MI society (SMIA)
Spain	I+S	SEIS	-	-	6	-	-	MI and other	-	-
Sweden	Computer Methods and Programs in Biomedicine	Elsevier	Torny Groth	1985 ISSN 0169-2607	12	paper/email/online	yes	English	MI	international	subscriptions
Ukraine	Clinical Informatics and Telemedicine	UAMI	Oleg Yu Mayorov	2003 ISSN 1812-7231	2-3	email	yes	Ukrainian/English	MI and other	international	public institution
United Kingdom	Informatics in Primary Care	Radcliffe Publishing	Simon de Lusignan	1993 ISSN 1476-0320	4	paper + online	yes	English	PHC and Clinical	yes, international	PHCG BCS + subscriptions
EFMI	International Journal of Medical Informatics	Elsevier	Charles Safran, Jan Talmon	1961 ISSN 1386-5056	12	paper/online	yes	English	MI	international	subscriptions
	Methods of Information in Medicine	Schattauer	Reinhold Haux	1962 ISSN 0026-1270	6	paper/online	yes	English	MI	international	subscriptions

The frequency of ISSN registered publications varies: one journal is published biannually, two quarterly, one every two months, five journals are published 2–3 times per year, two journals monthly and one journal nine times per year. Medical informatics is the principal subject of all of the journals, but several of them focus on other sub-disciplines and allied disciplines. Most of the medical informatics journals are international publications, though three are restricted to national circulation. Two journals are financed by ministry of health and/or other public institutions, while others use subscription as the way of financing.

4. MISSION STATEMENTS OF TASK FORCE OF EFMI JOURNAL EDITORS.

Editor-in-Chiefs of medical informatics journals are invited to create a joint mission statement and set out the objective and purpose of all EFMI journals. We believe that the joint statement will foster the dissemination of scientific knowledge and increase our understanding of medical informatics as a discipline. Additionally, we intend to produce and issue a core document stating the fundamental principles upon which all medical informatics journals editors should agree. The common goals will be identified and agreed on the scope and standard of papers that should be published in EFMI medical informatics journals. The reasons for setting out the statement are:

To promote editorial excellence by enforcing the use of standards and guidelines (International Committee of Medical Journals Editors guidelines; Committee of Publication Ethics; other relevant documents [7]);

To improve the quality of scientific studies published in EFMI medical informatics journals by imposing same standards for evaluating studies in medical informatics (guidelines already accepted as official EFMI document, but there were no further steps taken to ensure their use);

To promote scientific publishing excellence by enforcing standards of paper formatting (‘camera-ready’ manuscript format; Vancouver referencing style);

To improve diffusion of scientific knowledge through the medical/health informatics area (recognition and diffusion of EFMI research, education, clinical practice guidelines in EU countries should be promoted);

To increase collaboration among EFMI medical informatics journal editors and schedule regular meetings of the Task Force;

To explore the potential for using shared pool of reviewers, sharing information on review process and sharing expertise: technical editorial information, experiences, initiatives, publishing resources and tools (such as the open source Open Journal System or commercial/publisher solutions);

To encourage articles not suitable for medical informatics journals to be published elsewhere and support the communication with editors of such journals;

To provide a common voice when issues of common interest arise and enhance collaboration between national societies and EFMI bodies;

To promote European initiatives in stimulating publications and top-quality research.