New EBVMA site designed for collaboration

The EBVMA is rolling out a much needed redesign of its online presence. This site is currently in βeta, which means we will be evaluating and testing new features, functions, open standards compliance, usability and design over the coming months. We are especially excited by the opportunity to offer the community the ability to contribute and share content such as member profiles, featured stories regarding the research, education and practice of EBM, discussion forums, research tools, content syndication and more. The EBVMA is an inherently small organization with limited resources so our approach is to develop the site in an agile, iterative and transparent way over time. 

The redesign is based on a powerful and widely used open source content publishing platform. This same platform is used by an impressive array of academic, government, and business organizations such as The Onion, Fast Company, NASA, Fox Searchlight, Harvard's Science and Engineering group, Greenpeace UK, Amnesty International, Novell, Popular Science, FedEx, Flock, Oxfam International, and the new whitehouse.gov.

Our new infrastructure is especially adept at building collaborative research communities. One organization with similar goals and using some of the same tools is the Science Collaboration Framework, a resource designed to build virtual teams for research in biomedicine and with a special focus toward linking knowledge within journal articles and personal biographies.

Behind the scenes, the EBVMA site will use a taxonomy or vocabulary to provide additional semantic integration to components as they are developed. It is expected this will improve the ability to query and discover more relevant content as well as improve the ability to find other members of the community with similar research, teaching or application interests. 

A feature under development is a tool to automate the capture and publication of veterinary literature updates.  One method is the  collection of syndicated content from selected veterinary journals such as the Journal of the American Veterinary Medical Association, Veterinary Research Communications or Veterinary Ophthalmology.

Another component gathers articles that have been indexed by the National Library of Medicine (PubMed) with terms related to EBM methodology such as epidemiologic methods, random-controlled trials, research design, retrospective studies or simply evidence-based medicine. Terms can also be semantically searched or browsed for diseases, drug therapy or other clinical concepts such as pain, acupuncture,  risk factors, vaccination, anti-bacterial agents, or drug-compounding. Because terms are based on Medical Subject Headings (MeSH) and the volume of veterinary literature indexed with EBM related terms is relatively small, discovery of EBM articles for a specific disease such as diabetes mellitus or drug such as fentanyl will be intrinsically small. This of course is an area ripe for active EBVM research. We greatly encourage the EBVMA community to contribute to improving and creating web-based decision support tools over time.

Four primary introductory sections of the site are designed to help aggregate EBM content based on activity. Although these sections are sparse now, our approach toward a shared virtual community of practice will leverage the collective intelligence of EBVMA members who will contribute to the site's development. Contributions regarding content and organization from members during this beta development phase will be essential and greatly appreciated.

Discover, will provide guidance and links to resources for those new to EBM, but also experienced practioners find newly published literature and more. Learn, aggregates training materials, especially those provided by the EBVMA community such as tutorials, screencasts, and recorded presentations. Practice, is a special content area designed for busy practioners to effectively and efficiently apply evidence-based medicine at the point-of-care. And lastly, Share is an area that will feature member created case studies, tutorials, forum discussions and other ways to contribute your expertise and experiences with the rest of the community.

Current EBVMA members will soon receive an email invitation to register. Members who have a MyAccount area will be able to fill-out an extended profile including a biography, links to external resources such as a faculty page, social networking integration (e.g. LinkedIn, Facebook, Twitter, etc.) and more. Active EBVMA members will also be able to post new stories or create blog entries as well as participate in forum discussions. Except for forum postings, all new featured content (e.g. stories, blogs, etc.) will undergo a brief editorial review by the web committee prior to publication and newly published guidelines will be posted in the member area as well.

If you are an EBVMA member and wish to participate as an editor or to manage a developing content area, we really need your help! 

For general questions about the EBVMA, please contact any of the Officers. For questions regarding new or updated membership, please contact Dr. Roy Montgomery. For website questions, concerns or suggestions, please contact either Kate Anderson or Stuart Turner, or better yet, use our contact form.