To read the current Issue of the GO RAD follow the link:
http://www.isradiology.org/gorad/buscador.php?t=3&IdRevista=77
Annual Report
Dear colleagues,
It gives me great pleasure to write to you with an update on GO RAD.
As you know, in the fall of 2009, the International Society Radiology (ISR) launched an initiative known as “GO-RAD” (www.isradiology.org/gorad), a consortium of cooperating national, multi-national, and continental radiology journals/publishers that cooperate to provide immediate open access to selected, practical, radiology literature, at the time of first publication. Content is targeted to radiology practitioners in developing nations and medically underserved populations.
In the two years since its inception, we have been busy growing GO-RAD to 30+ participating journals, from six continents, that contribute articles on a regular basis! (please see appendix A). Let me take this opportunity to welcome our many new journals and thank their publishers for partnering with us.
Our website usage statistics tell us that we receive 3-4000 unique page visitors per month from over 115 countries. This has grown slowly but substantially the past two years since inception. The countries that register the largest number of visits (excluding the US) are Spain, Mexico, Argentina, India, Brazil, Canada, Portugal, Peru, Turkey, and South Africa. While it would be gratifying to see large numbers of visits from some of the world’s most under-resourced countries, we must bear in mind that the numbers of radiologists in some of these countries are so few, that they will statistically be difficult to track. However, anecdotal experience tells us that GO-RAD is accessible and valued in places such as North Africa, East Africa, Central and South America, and even China . We offer the GO RAD collection 10 times per year through our email newsletter announcement. To see growth in readership, we need to grow our email distribution list. This is an area that we can use your help. We welcome all ideas and suggestions for this.
The feedback that we have received has been very heartwarming. Here are a few quotes that capture the sentiments of our readers: from two radiologists in Mexico “Thank you for this wonderful gift. This is really a great job you are doing bringing education at no cost to the whole world. Congratulations” and “I just wanted to tell you that we have your link in our blog and is a great tool for us, thank you for your amazing labor, we really feel that there are no limits for learning...thanks to people like you”; and from a radiologist in Bangladesh “very good online portal for us radiologists to know about emerging technologies & recent developments”.
To help coordinate more than 30 journals, all with different publishing schedules, last fall we welcomed Dr. Hans Blickman to GO RAD as associate editor. Some of you I know have already interacted with him as we begin to share some duties.
In the near future, we will work toward making our respective workflows more efficient. We look forward to hearing from you on how we might improve our regular communications and interactions. Please send us your comments and suggestions on how to improve GO RAD.
I hope that you have found this brief report helpful and also hope that this project has been as rewarding for you as it has been for us. On the half of my colleagues at the International Society Radiology and GO RAD, we wish to most gratefully thank all of our participating publishers, editors, and their staff for contributing to this global outreach effort. We wish you all continued success for 2012.
Yours sincerely and respectfully,
Eric
Eric J. Stern MD
Editor, GO RAD
Appendix A