Medical research and social media: Can wikis be used as a publishing platform in medicine?

The authors are on the editorial team of Open Medicine. opment at Open Medicine: the launch of the Open Medicine wiki. The first publication to be housed on the wiki is a scoping review of studies examining the use of asynchronous telehealth 1 by Deshpande and colleagues. The interactive article allows users to log in and edit, delete or add content to the review and to look at changes other users have made to the document. Why are we using wiki technology as a publishing platform? Wikis enable a network of users to edit documents collaboratively and on an ongoing basis. This may be particularly relevant to scoping and systematic reviews, which, depending on their area of focus, can quickly become outdated as new studies are published. 2 A wiki — a potentially revolutionary tool for knowledge transfer — makes it possible to keep reviews as current and relevant as possible. Just as knowledge evolves in medicine, a wiki evolves as new evidence emerges and is incorporated into it. Providing authors and readers with the means to update documents has rarely been done by biomedical publishers, despite some clear advantages. First, updates are publicly available as soon as they are incorporated into the wiki. Second, wikis create a centralized platform for easy editing. Third, they offer their own form of post­publication peer review in an open space where readers can see what changes have been made to a document and — if anonymous editing is prohibited — who made those changes; consequently, contentious points undergo close scrutiny and monitoring. It is important to note that as the authorship of the article expands to those contributing to the wiki, responsibility for the content expands as well. " Peers, " in this sense, are defined as those having adequate knowledge of an area to make responsible contributions. However, unlike three popular medical wikis — AskDrWiki, Ganfyd and Medpedia — Open Medicine will not limit contributions to qualified biomedical researchers, clinicians and experts. Contributors to the wiki may be patients who have undergone telehealth procedures, or health care practitioners who have used those procedures. Such contributions may lead to a re­ evaluation of how credible research, objective reporting and intellectual rigour are defined. Keeping the Open Medicine wiki open to everyone is an experiment, and we watch with interest. Some medical wikis ask contributors to send copies of their qualifications, something that not …