Report from the International Society for Managing and Technical Editors (ISTME) Annual Meeting Held August 4-5

By Wendy Krank, Managing Editor, Headache Currents; Membership Coordinator, ISMTE

ISMTE held its annual conference Tuesday and Wednesday, August 4 and 5.  Because of economic conditions, it was especially challenging this year to gather people together in one location, a priority of ISTME.  We did have an excellent registration that included a third of our membership along with several non-members.  

Invited speaker Kent Anderson of The New England Journal of Medicine and blogger from The Scholarly Kitchen shared with the attendees the importance of social networking for journal publishers.  Kent suggests checking out your titles at Twitter.com and searching on your journal's name; you might find a few surprises. With barriers to entry for these media, Kent states there is low risk in experimentation and high risk (i.e., obsolescence) in not giving it a try. Ultimately, you may understand your customers and the value of your content in ways you had never imagined.  

Kent’s presentation was a perfect introduction to the talk by Peter Binfied from PLoS One, who detailed the use of online-only formats as publishers move closer to their users and articles become more important than journals (and rating systems change). Electronic gadgetry use only enhances the audience’s experiences with online publications; the technological age has arrived at our doorstep.

Tom McLung spoke during the Wednesday session about the best uses of conditional formatting and filters to identify data of interest in an Excel file. VLookup lets you relate elements in one table to those in another. Looking for a report? VLookup can automate this task with pivot tables that allow you to look at your data in flexible combinations that when created can be used as a shell with which to process updated data. Mastering these and other Excel features will streamline your reporting tasks no matter what peer review system you use.

Preliminary survey results from attendees reflect positive comments regarding worthwhile, excellent presentations and speakers and reflect high desire for being part of the ISTME group.?
There's still time to register for the UK meeting in Oxford on August 25 – don't miss it!

Here’s our registration link: http://www.ismte.org/conferences2009.html

For those interested in membership or to ask questions about this article, contact me at Wendy Krank, headachecurrents@qwest.net