English: Talk from APA2019

Wikipedia-integrated medical journals as a key health literacy and outreach platform' 2019-08-11
Abstract: The internet is the first port of call for most people when looking for medical information. >70% of internet users use online health information and although 50% state that it influenced their decision, 35% don't fllow this up by visiting a clinician. Wikipedia is the most-accessed source of health information and so the accuracy of its medical content has a large impact on health literacy. However, clinicians, researchers and allied professionals rarely contribute to creating and improving its articles.
The WikiJournals of Medicine is a Wikipedia-integrated academic journal that addresses this problem in two ways. Firstly, it rewards authors with citable, indexed review publications to incentivise contribution. It is able to publish fully open access and without any author fees since it is hosted on Wikimedia Foundation servers and runs with a volunteer staff. Secondly, by subjecting submissions to rigorous external peer review, it ensures that the information is accurate and up to date. In addition to adding new articles to the encyclopedia, existing Wikipedia articles can also be expanded or overhauled and submitted for the same peer review and publication process. Each article is commonly read >100,000 times per annum with many above a million reads.

In this way WikiJMed and its sister journals improve the accuracy of the encyclopedia with high-quality, peer-reviewed content, and reward authors with publications that achieve far greater reach than any traditional scholarly publishing. Developing and expanding these journals is vital mechanism for ensuring the accuracy of biomedical information on a platform that is read millions of times per day.