VIDEO + JOURNAL = VJSM

The medium is the message.

Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media, Chapter 1

2020 was not our favorite year, but 2021 has burst upon us with hope and promise. It is a year to reconnect with friends and the outside world, to create and innovate. In that spirit of innovation, the American Orthopaedic Society for Sports Medicine and its international society partners are delighted to introduce the newest member of our family, the Video Journal of Sports Medicine. VJSM proudly takes its place alongside the American Journal of Sports Medicine, Sports Health: A Multidisciplinary Approach, and the Orthopaedic Journal of Sports Medicine.

Every cloud has a silver lining, they say, and 2020 was not without its benefits. We learned how rapidly scientists could produce an effective vaccine when faced with the specter of a novel virus pandemic. We discovered new uses for our elbows, such as pushing elevator buttons and greeting friends and family. Faced with the cancellation of in-person orthopaedic and sports medicine congresses, we developed our ability to communicate and educate with “distance learning” techniques.

Distance learning is not new, of course. After all, print journals like AJSM are vehicles of distance learning, and they have been around for a long time. Electronic distance learning, on the other hand, is a relatively recent development. Before 2020, medical societies had indeed begun providing a variety of learning opportunities for members on their websites. However, the arrival of the pandemic has prompted societies to amplify and diversify their distance learning offerings.

The genesis of VJSM antedated the pandemic. We began to plan it in 2019, unaware of what the world would confront in 2020. With the support of the AOSSM Medical Publishing Board of Trustees, Steve Brockmeier, then the AOSSM educational chair, and I began to piece together our vision for a peer-reviewed video journal for the sports medicine community, with the expectation that Steve would become the Editor-in-Chief. A tenured member of the faculty at the University of Virginia, Steve’s extensive experience in clinical surgery, research, and teaching, combined with his service as team physician at multiple levels of competition, made him an ideal choice to head this exciting new project.

What was our rationale for a video sports medicine journal? With the advent of the Internet, educational video has proliferated for virtually every aspect of human endeavor, including orthopaedic surgery. If we want to learn how to bake a Black Forest cake, repair a leaky faucet, or perform anatomic anterior cruciate ligament reconstruction, we can easily locate a relevant video. However, a video that communicates scientific information or reviews a surgical procedure deserves to be scrutinized and vetted more carefully than one that teaches baking or home repairs.

In a recent post in the online blog The Scholarly Kitchen, the CEO of a hosting platform dedicated to scholarly media outlined her vision for the future of academic and scientific video. The title, “Video is Here. Time to Embrace it,” captured the essence of her argument. Her point: video is an integral part of contemporary life, but scholars and scientists have been slow to embrace it as a serious means of communication. A key part of her advice for helping video achieve its full potential in publishing was this admonition: “Treat video seriously. Make sure your videos are peer reviewed.”²

Medical professionals rely on journals as their source of scientific information because they know that the articles that appear on their paper or electronic pages have been winnowed by the peer review process. Winston Churchill famously observed, “No one pretends that democracy is perfect or all-wise. Indeed, it has been said that democracy is the worst form of Government except all those other forms that have been tried from time to time.”¹ In a similar vein, peer review isn’t perfect or all-wise, but it remains a vital pinion of the process by which scientific, and specifically medical, information is recognized or discredited.

As a journal, VJSM has been established to unite the peer review process with video publishing in the field of sports medicine. All submissions to VJSM must go through peer review, where they are subject to critique by at least 2 members of the editorial board and subsequent revision or rejection. VJSM supplies its reviewers with a detailed evaluation scheme so that its submissions are not only scrutinized for scientific soundness but also maximized for educational value.

Many medical journals, including AJSM and its affiliates, contain supplementary videos that amplify their content. What sets VJSM apart is that, in VJSM, an 8- to 10-minute video is the primary component of the publication. Written material is confined to elements that complement the video: a structured abstract, a transcript of the video’s narration, the standard authors’ declaration of potential conflicts of interest, and the list of relevant references. As in any journal, VJSM’s articles will each have a DOI so that they are fully searchable.

The journal format of VJSM provides benefits to both its readers and contributors. Readers can be confident that all video articles published in VJSM have gone through a rigorous peer review process. VJSM authors will be pleased that their efforts will result in a credited journal publication, which will not only add to their curriculum vitae but also assure the citability and long-term preservation of their work. VJSM’s open access publication model ensures that its articles will be available worldwide via a Creative Commons license to any reader with Internet access. As with all our journals, authors will retain copyright of their work.

Like OJSM, VJSM is supported not just by the AOSSM but also by a worldwide team of partner societies. There is no charge to submit video articles, but accepted submissions are assessed an article processing charge (APC), which is set below typical open access APCs for print articles. These APCs help offset the cost of producing the journal. Members of VJSM’s partner societies receive a deep discount from the standard APC. In addition, APCs are discounted further for authors from countries on the World Bank list of lower-middle income countries and waived completely for authors from countries on the list of low-income countries.

It is intended that the video articles in VJSM will cover the full spectrum of surgical and nonsurgical sports medicine topics. This will include videos that present original research; review the literature; or teach classic or introduce new methods of surgery, rehabilitation, physical examination, or on-field injury management. We look forward to seeing VJSM authors sharing their work with the international sports medicine community with rigor and creativity via this contemporary medium.

Bruce Reider
Chicago, Illinois