|
WHAT'S THIS?
|
VIEWPOINTS << Interview with Chris Graf
|
An interview with Chris Graf
Published 14 January 2009
Chris Graf is the publisher of the International Journal of Clinical Practice and an Associate Editorial Director at Wiley-Blackwell.
What does your job involve?
In short, my job involves wearing many hats...
I’m the publisher of International Journal of Clinical Practice. This means sitting in the middle of all the functional processes (editorial, sales, marketing, production) and making sure they’re all pointing in the right direction. It means working with the editors in chief and associate editors, to build and set a strategic agenda for IJCP. It means letting the editors in chief and associate editors get on with their job, free from interference. It means working with authors and contributors to make sure they get the best experience from the IJCP publishing machine. And it means understanding what IJCP’s clinical readers actually want, and feeding this into the journal machine, back at the start, at a strategy level.
I’m also one of the Associate Editorial Directors in the Wiley-Blackwell medical division, and my responsibilities here focus on informing the strategy that will get us the most out of our clinical research publishing, particularly therapeutics research, now and in the future. So my ears are always open, ready for new ideas.
I work on a number of other more specifically ‘therapeutics’ oriented journals with my colleague Rosanna Diogini – namely the excellent Cardiovascular Therapeutics, and CNS Neuroscience & Therapeutics.
I’m a board member of ISMPP. I carry the official ISMPP title ‘Member at Large’ which, in my mind at least, gives me an excuse to wear many more hats.
And I just got appointed to Council at Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE).
How did you get to where you are?
I graduated with a degree in Chemistry in 1995 and decided that publishing was what I might want to do. Luckily I was right. I started off as the managing editor of a medicinal chemistry journal, and have gradually become involved with all things more and more clinical since then. My wife and I decided to up-sticks and leave London a few years ago, so I hustled for a job at Blackwell (now Wiley-Blackwell). It turned out that they had something for me that fitted my experience pretty well: IJCP.
What do you enjoy most and least about your job?
My favourite part of publishing is the people (and the gossip) I know. I have a great network of good friends and colleagues, and contacts around the world, across clinical medicine and research, and in industry and medical communications.
The most exciting part of clinical publishing right now for me is experimenting with new things – whether web based or more traditional – that add value for readers and authors to the work we publish for them. If you want to see some of our experiments check out What’s New in Clinical Publishing.
The most pleasing part of my recent IJCP life has been the growing success of the journal. The re-launch we’re doing right now (January 2009 is pictured) has also been rewarding. Everyone reading this should check out what we’re doing on www.IJCP.org.
Least favourite? Publishing errata for silly, avoidable mistakes.
What are your top 5 favourite online resources?
Every day starts, after a cup of fresh, strong, coffee (shame you can’t get that online), with a Google (and it likely ends with a Google too). I pretty much live in PubMed. LinkedIn is great. And after that it gets a bit woolly – I guess I get what I need from the web, but don’t look anywhere in particular for it.
What are the most important issues in publication planning – past 5 years, present, future?
Past 5 years: Killing off the ghost and guests (I think we’re nearly there…).
Now: Establishing good publication planning as a valuable and reputable profession, and the reputation of those engaged in publication planning as responsible, ethical professionals. The certification provided by the ISMPP credentialing program is, I think, going to go a long way towards this (for those individuals who take it). And new good publication practice (GPP2) will be ready soon, with clear and up to date guidelines for everyone involved.
5 years: Exploring new ways of communicating clinical information, alongside traditional journal publications. Richer experiences for authors and journal readers, online. More evidence-based medicine and the rise of point-of-care clinical information.
What are the challenges in deciding authorship of papers reporting large, multicentre studies with many investigators?
At first glance, the ICMJE criteria might appear to spell it out. But when you have multiple individuals over a long period of time making various contributions, and when you have human beings with all that lovely ambition, aspiration and drive vying for spots on the author by-line, things get tricky. There are many challenges.
Ultimately those who are named as authors should have, in a way, selected themselves by contributing sufficient work to a study and its reporting. So documenting contributions throughout the process will enable publication professionals to – to some extent – arbitrate and attempt to oversee honest, transparent attribution of authorship.
One good trick, I think, is to explain things to everyone way up front – perhaps as early as when the protocol is finalised. This means having a publication policy yourself. Some ideas...
Hold an open process that enables candidates (perhaps investigators) to identify their interest in joining a ‘writing group’. They could even apply formally.
Work with perhaps the principal investigator to consider the tasks that will need to be done to analyse, interpret and report the results in the light of those who applied to join the writing group, and to choose who should be invited to join the writing group.
Convene a writing group by formal invitation.
Some of the members of the writing group will likely be authors at the end of the process, some won’t. Explain what will be required of them, as well as what will be merely expected of them, and explain the eventual criteria for authorship. In fact, explain everything about the publication process – probably face to face – including your publication policy.
Write it all down and get signatures.
Then document everything after that point.
And: Follow good publication practice. The new GPP guidelines (GPP2) will be available early in 2009, with more practical guidance for everyone involved with publishing information with funding from the biomedical industry. I hope to see GPP2 presented for the first time at the 5th ISMPP Annual Meeting, in Philadelphia, April 2009.
Does the future lie with online journals or will print journals continue to dominate for the foreseeable future?
First, there’s a clarification to be made: Any print journal of repute is also an online journal. It’s my experience that online publishing drives the publication processes and that the print version of most journals follows the online one. So online is not just the future. I’d say it is also the ‘now’.
An exception, I imagine, might be those journals that rely heavily on print advertising. In journals like these the publication process may well still be geared around print publication schedules, and will likely remain so until the markets for print advertising change.
While the obvious view is that online is the future, in clinical publishing print is still holding its own. I imagine this is simply because doctors are very mobile during their working days (more so than other professions), and so spread their reading (and they do a lot of that) over many physical locations. Perhaps when you consider this it’s not really a surprise that print remains valuable.
How will posting of clinical trial results on registries affect journal publications?
I view clinical trial posting a little like the presentation of results in abstracts or posters at congresses. Clinical results, in my opinion, are worth much more when they have been interpreted, analysed and contextualised by the authors of a manuscript, and that they gain more value and credibility from the validation that peer reviewed journals provide (not to mention an audience of readers and a means for further discussion and evaluation among those readers).
But career meta-analysts are probably salivating about the chance to mine clinicaltrials.gov for all that new untouched data. We’ll probably see a slew of meta-analyses including clinical data gleaned from databases. One of the issues is that a new meta-analysis may be published before the investigators/authors of the original research have interpreted their results in a primary journal publication. There’s obviously going to be some tension there. And I imagine this will pile on the pressure for authors and publications professionals to publish primary results papers earlier and earlier, before someone else does it for them.
Is 'marketing' a dirty word in relation to publication planning?
I think it’s all about ‘means and ends’.
Good publication planning, I think, is about ensuring that clinical information is communicated to the right audiences at a time when those audiences need that clinical information and in a way that it can be understood. Publications (and presentations, and other related forms of biomedical communication) are a means to do this: to communicate clinical information with the right audiences. That’s one ‘means’ and one ‘ends’.
A different, and legitimate, ‘end’ that can be derived from the same ‘means’ is for marketers to support their marketing using evidence from the published journal literature. And I can only support evidence-based marketing, especially in medicine. But at the same time, the objective for clinical publications should not be to market drugs.
|
Feedback: Do you have any comments about this article? Contact the Publisher, Peter Llewellyn.
|
|
|
