Medical and scientific publisher Karger organised two Innovation Forums at the Basel Life congress on September 12, 2017. The first of these forums explored the field of digital health data and marked the launch of the new Karger Open Access journal Digital Biomarkers. In addition, Karger put the finger on the pulse of innovation in scientific publishing to ensure the needs of the biomedical community are met.
The tracking and recording of health data with devices like smartphones provide the opportunity to fundamentally advance the understanding of health. This also enables a different relationship between patients and doctors and plays a major role in explaining, influencing or predicting health-related patient outcomes. These advancements in public health were the topic of the Karger Innovation Forum on digital biomarkers at Basel Life. Digital biomarkers are defined as objective, quantifiable physiological and behavioral health data that are measured and collected by means of digital devices such as portables, wearables, implantables or digestibles.
Speakers on the topic of digital biomarkers were Suchi Saria from Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore, USA, and Ray Dorsey, from the University of Rochester, USA, and the Editor-in-Chief of the new Karger Open Access journal. The speakers were joined by Ieuan Clay from Novartis and Christian Gossens from Roche in a panel discussion moderated by Frank Kumli from Ernst & Young - all three from Basel, Switzerland.
This Innovation Forum also served as the launch event for the new Karger Open Access journal Digital Biomarkers. The journal will be published online only, Open Access. Article processing charges (APC) will be waived at least for the first year.
To design the agenda for the second Innovation Forum 'Innovating MedComms', Karger invited representatives from pharmaceutical companies to discuss their challenges and needs in scientific publishing. From this basis, specialists in scientific publishing gave insights into areas such as reproducibility of results, quality of peer review, new communication channels for scientific results such as videos or infographics, as well as technological innovations to enhance the discoverability and tracking of relevant articles. Participants also learned how to prepare for future developments in submission tools, raw data availability, machine learning, as well as text and data mining. This session was co-organised by the Zurich-based firm Medicalwriters.com.
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