A librarian walked into a doctor’s office looked around at the steel cabinets overflowing with paper files taking up valuable office space and turned away with a knowing smile. Then the Librarian said to the doctor, ‘Don't worry, this won't hurt a bit.' (Courtesy of Data Conversion Laboratory Inc.)

Guess what? It does hurt. Ask any corporate, government or institutional IT or eHealth organization. Information transformation, management and delivery are painfully slow, demanding, in need of continuous innovation and scores of resources. Google, the gargantuan driver of this industry is really just a sophisticated search engine (with benefits) that serves . . . well, everybody. It takes +35,000 employees to keep Google going.

Longwoods is smaller and not without its challenges. I’ll share some to show you what we will do in 2012.

Longwoods provides healthcare’s policy makers, administrators, suppliers and clinicians reliable resources, better ideas, better products, better practices and better services – all in the pursuit of better care. Layered on top of this are the rules and demands of academic publishing – something that affects most of what we do.

The healthcare sector benefits from an unrelenting delivery of new and improved ways to finance, provide and manage care. It counts on journals, websites, social media, radio, television, educational programs and mentoring to explore, inform and translate this information for its use. This is our challenge. Fortunately, like the sector we serve, we too benefit from new ideas, technologies, priorities and resources to help us deliver.

So how are we doing? Or, more to the point, how are you doing? To measure our success we rely on selected indicators. The rate and quality of editorial submissions, citations, the reputation of our editors, participation in our virtual and live events and, of course, subscription revenue are some we watch closely. The most important is readership. Fortunately a dispassionate, evenhanded (albeit blunt) indicator is available to determine and compare readership online. It’s Alexa.com. We follow it regularly and combine it with Google’s Analytics suite to provide the information we find useful in fine tuning our publishing program.

It appears that we have earned the loyalty of enough readers to rank well on the Alexa scale. To find our last published report click on ratings. Of an estimated 20 billion websites in the world, Longwoods.com ranks at about 17 thousand in Canada and well below 500 thousand globally. This rank is generally driven by ideas from our authors and commentators. Ideas that our editors determine are meaningful and helpful and our publishers deliver in an engaging way every day. There exists a healthy enthusiasm to share information in the form of opinions, statistics, policies, practices and evaluations that can help deliver better healthcare.

Countless websites compete for our readers’ attention and so we are inevitably focused on earning and re-earning their respect and loyalty. Our goal is to exceed their needs with more, better, faster and cheaper information – just as they are driven to provide more, better, faster and cheaper healthcare.

We are in good company and motivated to build Longwoods into a Canadian treasure with global reach.

Our Products
We provide: Healthcare Quarterly | Healthcare Papers | Canadian Journal of Nursing Leadership | Healthcare Policy | Electronic Healthcare | Jobs.Longwoods.com | Breakfast with the Chiefs | a Video Library | Articles by Voice on iTunes| HealthcareRounds | Special Issues*| Special Reports*

*includes custom publishing using the same editorial standards set by our editors. The category also includes the permitted redistribution of material supplied by other organizations and considered by us to be of value to our readers.

Pages
Some 55,000 pages make up the Longwoods.com web site. (As measured by Google search.)

Readers come from these cities
Readers come from Canada of course, and from around the world. Here are the top five global city destinations (in order of significance): New York, USA; London, England; Sydney, Australia; Melbourne, Australia; Singapore.

. . . and these Countries
Of some 245 countries in the world we can only identify six that have not been served by Longwoods.com over the last three months.

Referring Websites
 The top four websites -- from Canada and the globe -- referring readers to longwoods.com are:

We appreciate this international recognition. But wonder . . .

Going Digital
Going digital is a sophisticated and resource-hungry strategy. Competition comes from many platforms (plain old websites, personal and institutional blogs, electronic letters, interactive options, apps, directories, social media and more.) The plethora of new technologies gives us no choice but to focus on these waves of internet-based media and to respond thoughtfully.

Undoubtedly we will provide everything we have ever published in multiple formats like “voice over internet protocol”, social media, digital videography and photography, web, blogs, apps, twiter, text and email for platforms such as iPads, iPods, tablets, phones, computers and many more options that Google and Microsoft and Apple and HP and McKesson and IBM and Philips are offering and inventing right now.

We will also have new distribution systems. Email, for example, has met its match with text and twitter and social media. VOIP such as Skype is on our list. While POT (ahhh, yes, the plain old telephone) is dying. What will be next and what will be the sacrificial lambs.

And there are now many news aggregators. Do we compete or collaborate? And the developers are asking: Will HTML 5 replace Flash videos for webpage video? We will study all this to understand the implications. No doubt it will affect all the new platforms. How else will they sell all those iterations of iPads? And lately there is talk about targeted black outs on Google and Facebook and Amazon -- a strategy to stop piracy. What’s next? This could help. Or hurt. Watch for it.

And here is a layer most readers are not aware of.

Longwoods, as a member of the academic publishing community, where everything is indexed and archived, has to convert documents to the PubMed Central Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) specification for institutional repositories, commercial publishers and association publishers. The JATS specification includes NML XML for journals and manuscripts as well as Bookshelf XML for books.

Having documents stored in a single format is important regardless of our adherence to paid access, public access or open access. While documents can be maintained in a number of formats, several other organizations with institutional repositories, have selected XML as their target format. Fortunately organizations like Data Conversion Laboratories support conversion services to all formats such as XML, XBRL, EPUB, MOBI and more.  Got it?

Our plans for 2012 will be flexible and responsive. They look more or less like this. 

  1. digital by the end 2012.
  2. more online exclusives (independent of any journal brand)
  3. appeal to more micro sectors in healthcare
  4. create an online community of readers and experts through digital interaction, using more technology. This will include heavy use of social media.
  5. we will continue and expand our live events programming including Breakfast with the Chiefs (BWTC), HealthcareRounds and BWTCx. All will be made available in digital formats of course.

We like the challenge. We appreciate your support and we invite your feedback. For more information, comments, suggestions contact thepublisher@longwoods.com

January 1, 1012

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PS: In the meantime the Globe and Mail reports that news and information provider Thomson Reuters Corp. said it has pulled the sale of its health care business, as tough economic conditions made it difficult to fetch a good enough price. The company had announced in June that it planned to sell the unit, which supplies health care data and analysis to companies, government agencies and health professionals, and which had revenue of about $450-million (U.S.) in 2010. Longwoods did send a letter of interest.