Background: Scholarly publication is key to success in academic medicine, but busy clinicians need support to build scholarship capacity. Most hospitalists across the country engage in clinical work but have few cost-effective options to disseminate clinically focused work in mainstream journals. Our Division of Hospital Medicine continually encourages publication of research, quality improvement, and medical education manuscripts via initiatives to support these efforts. Open access publishing is a way for hospitalists to disseminate findings, such as case reports and case series, but high costs associated with publication in these journals—ranging from $700 to >$1,500, including virtually all case report–specific journals—are often prohibitive, especially in a context of limited budgets.
Purpose: We launched the Hospital Medicine Publishing Fund to facilitate scholarly publication for junior faculty.
Description: We introduced the Fund at 10 hospital medicine sites in faculty site meetings. Faculty were invited to apply for funding using an online application to ensure first and/or senior authors were Division members and to confirm that the selected journal was not predatory. For authors seeking journal recommendations, we created a list of reputable case report–specific journals relevant to hospital medicine and a list of the top 10 journals where our faculty published historically. Applicants attached a copy of their paper for Division leadership review. A budget of $25,000 was allocated from healthcare system funding based on the Division meeting performance targets and on overall system financial performance. These funds are dedicated to reinvestment in innovation programs.From February through November 2022, 18 applications were received for 10 papers with 17 unique Division faculty coauthors. Six authors reapplied after initial rejection; 1 reapplied after withdrawing their paper after the journal failed to find reviewers; and 1 changed journals after award due to documentation requirements (written patient consent) that could not be met before submission. Seventeen applications were awarded funding, conditional upon paper acceptance; 1 was under review at the time of writing. The average among of funding requested was $800.78 and the average awarded was $794.94 (range for both: $260-$1180). Seven of 10 papers have been published, 2 are under review, and 1 has not yet been submitted. In total, $5050 has been disbursed to 5 authors; $900 is being processed for 1 author. One author who was awarded funding found a different source of funding and waived the award, and 2 who were initially awarded funding eventually published at journals without open access fees. A separate initiative within our Division that encourages emerging hospitalist scholars to write case reports for publication became a pipeline for the Publishing Fund.
Conclusions: The Hospital Medicine Publishing Fund is an effective tool to increase publications within an academic hospital medicine division. For junior faculty, who are often not researchers or medical education publishers, this provides an excellent opportunity. Areas of concern with open access publishing are both predatory costs and predatory journal practices; our review of journals and practices allowed us to filter out such journals. While there are a few other avenues of open access publishing funding for hospitalists, including library and School of Medicine funds, this is an example of innovative support for faculty by a Hospital Medicine division.