It is the opinion of the editors of the European Journal of General Practice that this journal should develop into an open-access journal, one way or another. We share the ambition to develop this 20-year-old quarterly into a leading journal of primary care medicine. A journal, acknowledged by researchers in the field and practising colleagues, and located on an interactive website, appealing to educators, students, policy makers and patients.
The European Journal of General Practice already is in the process of transition towards ‘less paper’ and ‘more web’. Since last year, we publish our papers online only. The European Journal of General Practice website is being used well, with around 45 000 downloads in 2013, and an increasing proportion of full-text downloads, now around 33%. The importance of subscriptions diminishes gradually.
Together with the publisher and Wonca Europe (i.e. the owner of the European Journal of General Practice), the editors are currently discussing the options for a viable business case for the European Journal of General Practice in the near future. The potential is enormous: Wonca Europe, through its member organizations, represents more than 80 000 family doctors in Europe. Finding a way to organize that number with the goal of ‘open access’ for all family physicians in Europe, is our common challenge.
For 2015 and beyond, the editorial team will invest its energy in relevant papers of high quality. We have decided to focus on scientific articles. We will re-group our papers into three categories: Editorials (including invited commentaries), Original research (full and short papers), and Reviews. The latter category includes systematic reviews, clinical case reviews and ‘other’ reviews (e.g. ‘keynote lectures’, ‘opinion papers’, and ‘position papers’). Finally, we are thinking about the option of a second abstract in the native language of the author(s) as a way to enhance our pan-European profile.
In this first issue of 2015, you will find answers to many questions by colleagues from various parts of Europe. Why do we perform health check-ups in asymptomatic patients (pp. 58–62)? Why should we prescribe antibiotics less often to febrile children with a respiratory infection (pp. 5–11)? When will we adhere to recommendations for antibiotic prescription in respiritory tract infections (pp. 12–18)? How well do various measures of multimorbidity reflect disability and frailty in the oldest old (pp. 39–44)? Does the absence of varicosities in a patient with superficial thrombophlebitis increase the probability that deep venous thrombosis is present (pp. 70–76)? Other topics include patient self-reports in population studies, Portuguese performance indicators, change of lifestyle, GP-cardiologist collaboration in diagnosis of heart failure, prediction of choosing a career in family medicine, and research in rural areas.
Finally, I should like to highlight the qualitative study from Croatia on how patients experience a myocardial infarction. The authors found six factors that facilitated patients’ coping with the event. Even more interesting, they could describe two different types of patients, each with different needs of care: some prefer to be left alone; others want your emotional support (pp. 19–25).