EDITORIAL

Maintaining excellence in the journal FEM-Fundación Educación Médica

Manteniendo la excelencia en la revista FEM-Fundación Educación Médica

Arcadi Gual

Director de la revista FEM-Fundación Educación Médica
E-mail: agual@fundacioneducacionmedica.cat

The publishing world, and more particularly that of scientific publications like FEM-Fundación Educación Médica, has been hit especially hard by the appearance of the new technologies, new ways of accessing and reading about the latest emerging issues in science, and changes in the way the printed press is distributed. Accordingly, with the intention of complying better with its founding resolutions and offering a better service to the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking community interested in the area of medical education, in 2015 as of volume 18 the journal FEM-Fundación Educación Médica will include a series of improvements that we wish to explain in this editorial.

The FEM has directed a scientific journal in Spanish uninterruptedly for the past 17 years - first with the name Educación Médica and now FEM-Fundación Educación Médica. Since it began it has had the same format, with issues devoted to the area of medical education appearing every three months, and it has always shown itself to be willing to face the challenges called for by the social changes taking place while at the same time constantly seeking excellence.

Firstly, the current three-monthly format (four issues per year) will become two-monthly (six issues a year). This increase in the frequency of publication will make it possible to reduce the time that elapses between acceptance of an article and its actual publication. At present, this period ranges from six to eight months, which is without a doubt too long for a scientific journal. In the same vein, the whole editorial process has been restructured with a new team of reviewers, a remodelled Editorial Board and completely overhauled teams of managers and section editors. It is only fair to acknowledge the technical capacity and countless hours of dedication that the current team has devoted to the journal. The FEM wishes to thank them expressly for their generous efforts.

The new editorial board has been asked to take special pains to safeguard the scientific excellence of the articles published in the journal. The quality of the publications needs to be ratcheted up in order to gradually approach the level of the international journals that lead the field in this area. If the researchers in our cultural setting compete at the same level as researchers from around the world in the different areas of biomedical knowledge, we have to strive to ensure that in the area of medical education they do so under the same conditions.

Despite the FEM's interest in maintaining the present format of the journal, the numerous requests for a more dynamic website, with online access to the journal, have led us to abandon the traditional hardcopy paper format. It is obvious that this brings with it a streamlining of costs, which were mainly derived from distribution and also, although to a lesser extent, from the actual paper itself. In any case, volume 18 will already be accessible online at the journal's refurbished website (www.educmed.net), which will be free-access throughout the whole of 2015. The efforts that will be made by the FEM and Viguera Editores in carrying out this change of format must not be seen as just a cost-related decision but essentially as the chance to achieve more widespread diffusion, greater access and more repercussion of the scientific content of the journal.

We are convinced that the Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking world interested in the area of medical education will understand the changes foreseen in the publication, as has been the case of the national and international institutions that back the journal (WFME, AMEE, FEPAFEM-PAFAMS, SEDEM, CDFM, COMB). Among these institutions, special mention must go to the Sociedad Española de Educación Médica, which once took the decision to adopt the journal as its official mouthpiece and whose stories are so closely related. Nevertheless, what we ask from these institutions, and especially the whole of our community of medical educators, is not only your comprehension but also your participation. Without this participation by the professionals working in our cultural setting, the path towards excellence in medical education will by no means be an easy one to tread.