Have Online International Medical Journals Made Local Journals Obsolete?

B ackground to the debate: All of the major international medical journals are now available both in print and online. Being online increases the potential for these journals to have a more global distribution. With the rise of these online international journals, what functions do local journals serve? Only a few journals in the developing world have a long history of survival. Many are struggling to remain afl oat, plagued with a lack of funding, irregular publication schedules, weak peer-review mechanisms that lack credibility, and poor local and international visibility. The factors leading to this situation are well known and are infl uenced largely by the lack of importance placed on journals by decision makers in government and academia, and the lack of opportunities for career development and academic progression in developing countries. Most journals are driven by the academic community. Journals in developing countries, particularly in Africa, are often published by professional associations and academic institutions. Most of these non–privately owned journals face staffi ng problems, have volunteer editors, and suffer from limited distribution. Many of these journals are not in the major indexing services and have poor visibility on the Internet. For researchers in the developing world, there is a strong pull toward publishing their research in well-established journals of developed countries. But the result is that this research becomes inaccessible to researchers, clinicians, and health policy makers in developing countries, given their limited access to the Internet and the high cost of subscriptions to the established journals of the developed world. This problem is compounded by the fact that many policy makers are not aware of what is published in local journals, and so the fi ndings of research published locally are not put to their full use. Research published in local journals is also not readily visible to the rest of the international scientifi c community. A recent report by the Academy of Science of South Africa, for example, showed that in the past 14 years, one-third of South African journals had not had a single paper quoted in their international counterparts [1]. In the face of these problems, it is legitimate to ask whether journals in the developing world meet the roles for which they were established. Journals are expected to provide a medium for scholarly discourse, sharing of information, and dissemination of knowledge and practices. The basis of these interactions is scientifi c research, …