Program Information
IOMP New Professional Journal MEDICAL PHYSICS INTERNATIONAL Initial Results
S Tabakov1*, P Sprawls2 , (1) IOMP President, King's College London, London, UK, (2) Sprawls Educational Foundation, Montreat, NC
Presentations
SU-F-P-41 (Sunday, July 31, 2016) 3:00 PM - 6:00 PM Room: Exhibit Hall
Purpose:
The number of professional and educational sessions and presentations at World Congresses (WC) doubled during the past 12 years. Alongside this, many new e-learning and related initiatives underpinned the global growth of medical physicists. A number of meetings discussed the need of an international forum to discuss medical physics education and professional development. In 2013 IOMP initiated a new Journal for the purpose - MEDICAL PHYSICS INTERNATIONAL (MPI) - a free access e-publication (www.mpijournal.org).
Methods:
The presentation discusses the original statistics from the MPI server, related to number of downloads and visits. It also reflects the discussions at the Meet the Editor activities.
Results:
From the first issue of MPI the number of unique visitors is c.4000 per month. The period after WC2015 shows 50% increase of these. This is substantive number for a profession with c.22,000 members globally. So far MPI has produced 6 issues (2 per year) with overall 390 pages. It also published the abstracts of 2 International Conferences - 840 pages. The overall visits of the MPI web site (April’2013 – March’2016) is c.172,800. The 45 professional and educational papers published in MPI have c.35,000 downloads. Specific interest attract also the papers describing technological innovations for educational purposes (some papers being contributed directly from the industry) - they have c.52,000 downloads. The feedback from colleagues - communications with the Co-Editors (Tabakov and Sprawls), and at the recent WC, revealed that many are using the educational materials presented at MPI in their everyday teaching.
Conclusion:
MPI is already an asset for the profession, describing and encouraging a number of new professional activities and enriching the educational process. MPI has now initiated new activities as direct links with the research-orientated medical physics Journals in order to increase the international use of these and strengthen professional collaboration.
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