Each year the BMJ runs an online reader survey. The survey is mainly multiple choice but there is also a free text question where we ask readers: “What single improvement to bmj.com would make the most difference to you?” Every year the most popular response is “Make it free.” There are other recurring responses to the survey. In 2012 there were lots of requests for a simpler navigation and less clutter, a better search engine, and clearer access to article pdfs. more…

 The editor emailed me this to seek my views about how to make her weekly Editor’s Choice more relevant to the journal’s online readers. 

The article gets posted on bmj.com every Wednesday and appears in print two days later (all BMJ articles appear online ahead of print). Editor’s Choice helps busy print readers navigate that week’s issue, pointing out articles that have caught her eye as editor. more…

Should the journal article change, and if so, how? In this multimedia age, the workforce is increasingly populated by people who grew up with the internet, scholarly publishers anticipate the demise of the traditional article and spend lots of time rethinking how best to present the information it contains. more…

I’m not surprised that Guy Kawasaki’s 10^th book is called Enchantment: How to Woo, Influence, and Persuade. It takes some chutzpah to assume near–zero knowledge of social media at a scholarly publishing conference but Kawasaki, a former “software evangelist” (I kid you not!) for Apple, pulls it off with an idiot’s guide to curation, tweeting, and why Google+ will ultimately succeed. more…

There are 1.1m cases of sepsis each year in the US, costing $17bn to treat and accounting for 17% of hospital mortality.

Doctors at Stanford University in Palo Alto, California wanted to help their fellow physicians to recognise and treat it, but instead of producing a paper or video, devised a game. more…

The departmental server went down in the period of time between leaving work on Friday evening and arriving home. In Hong Kong we are ahead of most of the world and so when our work hours are over, the west is just getting started. This is why the evening email check has become part of the daily routine. more…

Stanford University’s HighWire Press, webhosts to the BMJ and some 1400 other scholarly journals, convened its spring meeting in Palo Alto, California, on 7-8 June 2010 in warm, sunny weather on the stunning university campus. Some 200 US and UK publishing types attended, and the two days were filled with a real buzz from interesting presentations, Q&A sessions, and formal and informal discussions. more…

Day 2 of the SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) meeting started with what was probably the best attended session of the whole event. “Geoff and Kent redux” featured the always entertaining duo of Kent Anderson (Journal of Bone and Joint Surgery) and CrossRef’s Geoff Bilder, who, in their own inimitable fashion, presented their take on what’s going on the web and in the publishing industry—with participation from the audience. Should either of them ever need a job, an alternative career as after dinner speakers might be just the thing. more…

This year’s SSP (Society for Scholarly Publishing) annual meeting, “A Golden Opportunity,” started on Wednesday, 2 June 2010. The evening’s “networking reception” in the exhibition space was buzzing, creating great expectations for the next couple of days’ actual sessions. And although librarians, assorted publishing types, web hosts, and providers of all manner of publishing related services may on the surface perhaps conform more to the cliché of “quiet types,” the number of dynamic “mavericks” who have been shaping the US scholarly publishing landscape for quite a few years is not inconsiderable—and neither are they particularly quiet. Thursday afternoon’s session, “Lessons learnt and lessons learning,” gave a few examples of such outstanding individuals and their career paths (all of whom seem to have started out doing a fair amount of copyediting, later acquiring business skills). The take-home message? Don’t assume that there is a job in publishing that has your name on it. Keep learning, keep expanding your skills, and embrace change. more…

Patient and doctor interactions are one of the cornerstones of medical care and with the advent of modern technology, there is now more than one way for doctors and patients to communicate with each other. With the rise of the mobile phone, instant two way communication has become even easier. I have found that having a patient’s a mobile phone number a great resource when I need to contact them urgently when they have an abnormal test result. In addition, the general and widespread availability and use of e mail both within the healthcare setting and in society as whole, you would think patient and doctor e mail interaction is common. more…