The current state of scientific publications forces us to reflect.
We have at least two types of publication:
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practical publications made to be read by their peers and thus spreading the knowledge and the authors in the environment in which they live and work – these are reading magazines;
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publications made according to international standards, selected for indexing into a database and read via the Internet by researchers who may perhaps come to be interested in the subject anywhere in the world – these are the research journals.
The first is a magazine that will be received or purchased by the reader and will be part of her/his collection to be consulted when necessary; the second will be on the Internet and will be researched in databases and may never be seen in its physical form.
Both have their importance and usefulness according to the reason for consultation. The editors of reading magazines, for example, will consult research journals while producing their work.
The two types are not mutually exclusive or competing; they are merely options to be considered. The writer should, when setting up his/her text, choose one of the two options and develop his/her work with a clear purpose.
The agencies overseeing higher education value research journals and the services provided by the university, and due to this value, suggest that its members prioritize their publications in research journals. For this reason, over a period we experienced a flight of important publications from the RBO to research journals rarely consulted by orthopedists. This constituted an injury to Brazilian orthopedists, who did not have access to important national works, and to the writers who did not have had their recent studies published in their professional environment.
The RBO was traditionally a reading magazine, to be consulted and saved. It is distributed free of charge to the homes of 10,000 readers. Its indexation in Scielo has also turned it into a research journal, making its studies known in the national orthopedic environment and available to the researcher.
This qualification as an indexed magazine puts us in a new era, which will require the maintenance and improvement of the quality of its content, though with the advantage of making all this effort available to our nearly 10,000 members.
It is an honor for me to enter this new era as the fourth editor-in-chief of the RBO in its history of 42 years, succeeding Marcio Ibrahim de Carvalho, Donato D'Angelo, and Carlos Giesta.
I hope to be enlightened with the pioneering work of Marcio Ibrahim, who started the TEOT and the structured RBO, Donato D'Angelo's affection and sense of institution, who edited the RBO for 27 years, and the class and the rigor of Carlos Giesta, who allowed the journal to be indexed in Scielo.
I take on this mission with the awareness of taking on the most important job in my academic life and the greatest responsibility of my long career at SBOT.
I imagine the RBO as practical and accessible to the Brazilian orthopedist, with the quality of an international magazine. Toward this end, I am counting on the cooperation of all orthopedic surgeons who are sometimes readers and at other times editors of the RBO.