Medical publishing is an important business. It is also an important tool for promoting dissemination of knowledge, and creating a culture of quality in Health Institutions. Porto Biomedical Journal (PBJ) will constitute the frontpage of the most recognized institutions of Health and Medical Education and Research in Portugal, which are located in Porto.
Athough research data and educational innovations are increasing in number, many clinical researchers and educators do not submit their ideas for publication. Sharing a project of a new biomedical journal will be one important challenge for the decade starting in 2015, that will lead the Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto to the celebration of its 200 years allied to São João Hospital Center as its clinical structural partner. PBJ also emerges as an identified need of the newly created Consortium University Center of Medicine (CUME) Faculty of Medicine of the University of Porto-São João Hospital Center. Such a tool is also a need to integrate education and clinical science. CUME will support the quality and the challenge that will be provided by this new journal, as far as it will represent the need for internationalization and globalization of clinical education and scientific development.
PBJ will be a forum for publication in a widespread scope of biomedical areas, offering an institutional and international platform for the publication of innovation and research in Health professions. PBJ will focus on the needs of individual research communities across all areas of biology and medicine, publishing sound science, whenever an advance in knowledge is presented.
Within the scope of CUME, this peer-reviewed journal will consider articles in relation to the training of healthcare professionals, including undergraduate, postgraduate to continuing professional development. The journal will have a focus on educational paradigms, evaluations of performance, and evidence-based medicine.
The readers of PBJ will be clinical and preclinical health care professionals, education experts, policymakers, students and other professionals with an interest in health professions education. The Editorial teams will have a great responsability in assuring quality, developing calls for papers on important themes, developing special features that blend thinking in different fields, and soliciting commentaries on key topics.
We hope that they also find innovative ways to preserve the fundamental ideals that add value to a traditional journal issue: bringing coherence to a set of ideas, stimulating the imagination of readers, catalyzing dialogue in scientific and also social topics. PBJ has to foster education and to promote research on biomedical sciences in its most extended sense.
PBJ has to engage CUME to keep discussions, to introduce themes about challenges we face in health sciences and to stimulate our creative thinking. PBJ and CUME are the strongest association for the development of PBJ. We hope that the policy of publication cover innovations and research advances in health professions education.
PBJ will focus on publishing timely information on medical education practices and development, including basic science, clinical, and postgraduate medical education. The Journal is dedicated to virtually all fields of biomedicine and related tecnologies, methods, equipments, educational course and organization. The journal will also welcome valuable papers on aspects of medical education and history of medicine. PBJ will give wings to our best ideas in all the Biomedical areas. Provided it received adequate nurture, PBJ will encourage the scientific community to enjoy and learn from the journey as well as to provide outcomes for the destination.
The commitment of both FMUP and CHSJ is a challenge to the success of PBJ! We all share this challenge!