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© 2003 European Association of Cardio-Thoracic Surgery
From action to interaction – the first year of Interactive Thoracic and Cardiovascular SurgeryDepartment of Cardiovascular Surgery, Centre Hospitalier Universitaire Vaudois, Lausanne, Switzerland
* Tel.: +41-21-314-22-80, fax: +41-21-314-22-78. Received April 22, 2003; received in revised form April 22, 2003; accepted April 22, 2003 About a year ago, more exactly in the March 2002 Newsletter [1] of the European Association for Cardio-thoracic Surgery (EACTS), we officially announced the production of a new publication in addition to the "European Journal of Cardio-thoracic Surgery" (EJCTS). This new publication, which was named "Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery" (ICVTS), was designed to take advantage of the new media that became available through the inter-net, and their potential for enhanced communication [2]. At that time, we thought that the world-wide-web, would allow for realization of what we called a virtual conference, and this, very much in contrast to the traditional sequential paper based publications, which we had focussed on so far. The basic principle of the virtual conference concept is to pre-publish scientific work on the world-wide-web, to allow for a public discussion during a limited period of time, and to finally archive, both an electronic as well as a printed version of the original communications with their discussions. The original plan included four printed issues for the first year, which would be made available by joint subscription with the EJCTS. Following the announcement of the ICVTS web-site at www.ICVTS.org in March 2002, a series of scientific communications underwent fast-track review and was pre-published on the web, not as batch ready to form an entire issue, but one by one, immediately after type-setting. Likewise the incoming comments were added to the communication specific thread as soon as available. Once the discussion period closed, the communications and their discussions were moved to the archive section of the ICVTS web site. This basic pathway of function has remained unchanged since for ICVTS. The first printed issue of ICVTS appeared just in time for the 16th annual meeting of the EACTS, which was held in Monaco from September 22-25, 2002. As previously announced [3], the printed version is designed as a safe repository of the electronically archived communications and their discussions. This is the ICVTS equivalent to our congress presentations at the annual EACTS meeting, which are published in the EJCTS together with the discussions collected by a stenographer during the sessions, and thus the final step of the virtual conference concept as outlined above. During this first year of activity, ICVTS has published 4 issues including this one. Thus, until now, ICVTS appeared exactly according to the schedule and a total of 85 publications (by issue 14, 13, 28, 30) have been published in print. A total of 74 comments referring to 38 publications were received and published during this period of activity. In other words, almost half of the publications received comments and the median number of comments per publication is 2 with a maximum of 8. The number of comments per publication cannot necessarily be used as a ranking criterion with regard to quality of the ideas expressed. The fact, that some publications do not receive comments, can be interpreted in different ways: either the issues raised in the publication are of minor interest, or the message of the paper is widely accepted, and not much more can be said about it. The latter situation also occurs when the major arguments in favour or against a position have already been outlined in the respective discussion section. In contrast, publications provoking various comments may be provocative per se, or refer to a hot issue in our field, which has not been settled yet. Although the hottest discussion does not necessarily mean that the publication involved has the highest quality by scientific standards, it is quite obvious, that a very controversial discussion is documenting the attention a given publication gets - and this is exactly where the action in Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery is supposed to be. In summary, ICVTS appears to be well on track and it has already achieved an impressive resonance. Authors and readers/discussants deserve our gratitude for their efforts. However, further commitments are necessary in order to keep the momentum. There is one easy step to join the action of Interactive Cardiovascular and Thoracic Surgery: type www.icvts.org. This holds also true for the next level of action, which is interaction with on-line video [2,4]. doi:10.1016/S1569-9293(03)00084-7
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