The demise of reading: a problem reflected in open access journals?

Abstract

Right at the birth of orthopaedic surgery, innovations and new treatments were communicated through letters to societies and in treatises, and rather long textbooks describing experiences of treatments. In fact, the oldest known records of orthopaedic treatments described in the Edwin Smith papyrus from Ancient Egypt are true to this formula of simple series of descriptive cases, a method also used by the fathers of orthopaedic surgery in their own treatises in the 19th century. Academic medical writing, and specifically orthopaedic writing, became more formalised with the advent of scientific societies which soon started circulating newsletters that rapidly became journals with the addition of peer review, …