| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
|
|
|
|||||||
|
|||||||||
Chicago, Illinois
Before his retirement as Editor of the American Journal of Respiratory and Critical Care Medicine, Martin Tobin launched our society's third journal, the Proceedings of the American Thoracic Society. The emergence of PATS responds to the needs of the members of the society to have a forum for educational assemblies that cover in detail the broad aspects of important topics. Much as the American Journal of Respiratory Cell and Molecular Biology evolved from an expanding American Review of Respiratory Disease to meet the needs of the substantial community of basic science investigators in our society, PATS has been created to serve a forum for both basic and clinical investigation presented in review format.
Although the final details of the composition of the Journal are not entirely formulated, it is possible to elucidate the philosophy and at least some of the features in your new journal. PATS is neither Red nor Blue. As one its major functions, the new journal will run proceedings of meetings that are both basic and clinical. The best of these usually is a combination of the two—a march from the bench to the bedside. Publication of proceedings of these meetings generally is funded through industrial support. As such, each article in each proceeding will be screened initially through submission of a prospectus. Articles then will be submitted to the peer review process to insure that science is free of product promotion. PATS is a journal, not a supplement to a journal. Accordingly, it must stand on its own as a fully unbiased example in the critical review of scientific data. A "letter to the editor" section will be added, so that controversial points explored in the symposium from the prior edition can be discussed and debated in the next edition.
A fundamental question is whether industry can and should reasonably be expected to support educational publications free of product promotion. From long experience, I believe that industry should and will step up to the plate. Industry derives vast amounts of information for product development from our journals. As such, it is useful to all to have access to the summated knowledge in a particular area of interest that is free from product bias. Pharmaceutical companies have policies supporting educational activity as a legitimate arm of their relations with the medical and scientific community. We who provide much of the theoretical support for the development of new therapeutic modalities should reasonably expect that those who benefit from them will support our ability to communicate with each other in the publications contained within PATS.
PATS nonetheless needs to insure that the topics we choose originate from our perception of the need to acquire information for our members. By doing this, we insure that no apparent conflict of interest that might be perceived to suggest that symposia are promotional. PATS is the journal of our society, and we need to serve our members by organizing our own symposia, sponsored by the ATS. The next several issues of PATS will contain considerable backlogs of symposia related to issues of airway disease, both asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease. These are indeed the hot areas, but even in these areas, we need to move into issues of controversies surrounding pathogenesis, epidemiology, economics, and genetics. Editions are being considered to deal with areas that members of the society feel require extensive review—monographs developed around diverse topics that may be otherwise overlooked. Although no decisions have been made yet, some topics come to mind: tuberculosis (molecular to therapeutic), the immunocompromised host, pulmonary vasculidites and immune diseases, new approaches to the management of critical illness, and the epidemiology and genetics of respiratory diseases. Have some ideas of your own? I would love to hear them. The best of proposal would include a topic with a short rationale and a list of proposed articles with authors. This is the "virtual symposium"; no meeting need occur, but we can generate monographs, which will cover topics in detail at far less expense than conducting an actual meeting. Here again, we should approach friends in industry with proposals of our own to underwrite at minimal cost. In some respects, virtual symposia are the best of both worlds. Although meetings of outstanding scientists are of great interest to those participating, only those attending really benefit. Virtual symposia allow us to select the best in the field at the lowest cost to bring the benefits of carefully formulated, peer-evaluated reviews of a many aspects of a single topic to thousands of our readers.
Finally, we are considering another opportunity—the Master's Lectures. We will try to collate about 12 to 15 of the best lectures given each year at ATS courses, the international meeting, and from meetings abroad into a single eclectic volume each year. The lectures will be nominated by members of the Society. As many of these lectures already exist in slide form, assembling the talk should be a minimal imposition on authors for what we hope will be become recognized as an honor symposium from the world's best teachers.
The resources of our website can be used both in the lectures and for the virtual symposia, so that expensive color reproductions can be archived for easy access to our thousands of readers. And best of all, PATS will be free (that is, there will be no incremental charge for the journal above and beyond subscription to the existing journals). The origins of the publication arm of our society began as collated reviews in infectious and respiratory disease. While the American Review of Respiratory Disease evolved from the American Review of Tuberculosis, the ARRD kept its name for many years, long after its evolution into a journal of original investigation. The Red and Blue journals will continue to publish topical reviews; PATS will publish only symposia of topical science and will remain free of individual submission of previously unpublished findings. We continue a tradition by providing a forum much in the format of the original Blue journal by providing topical, in-depth reviews of respiratory and critical care medicine and the related basic science. Our mission is to serve the Society. In this role, I am honored to serve as your new Editor.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
A.R.L. has no financial or business conflict and this is an opening introduction to the mission of the new PATS.
This article has been cited by other articles:
|
|
 |
|
  A. R. Leff After One Year--The Vision for PATS. Proceedings of the ATS, January 1, 2006; 3(2): 129 - 129. [Full Text] [PDF]
|
|
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||
| HOME | HELP | FEEDBACK | SUBSCRIPTIONS | ARCHIVE | SEARCH | TABLE OF CONTENTS |
