Times change: the NVMO journal going from Dutch to English and from paper to electronics

Times change. The Dutch Association for Medical Education (NVMO) has existed for over 40 years. During almost all this time, the NVMO has had its own journal. In the early years, most articles in the journal focused on best practices and creative ways of teaching. Examples of topics were: the weekly exercise in pharmacotherapy, anatomy in vivo, problem-based learning or whether students can give lectures. We also saw policy and quality discussions about clerkships, simulated patients, selection of students, or facts and fables of teacher training. A regular custom was publication of the annual summary report of the Association for Medical Education in Europe conference. In this way, we informed our members about what was going on in medical education outside the Netherlands. After a couple of years we saw more and more research reports in our journal: reliability of oral examination, which problems do students report to the student counsellor, attitudes of medical students, how three different faculties score on the same progress test or the relation between skills training attendance and study progress. By the year 2000, we had around 400 medical education articles in Dutch, on paper. In the beginning years, a few enthusiastic NVMO members used the duplicator to print our journal, later we had a real publisher. Especially during the last decade the organization of the journal has become more and more professional. A couple of years ago we had the ambition to move from a club journal to a fully-fledged international journal, and Perspectives on Medical Education (PME) was born. PME wants to offer quality papers that are of interest to international readers such as medical teachers, educational developers, policy makers and researchers. We have noticed that authors and readers from all over the world know how to find the journal. The journal is printed five–six times a year.