Term limits for Doctors of BC committees

Issue: BCMJ, vol. 58, No. 4, May 2016, Pages 188-189 Letters
By: John Sehmer, MD

The contributions of the BC Medical Journal Editorial Board members are well respected. However, the current Editorial Board is made up of senior, long-serving, eminent physicians who do not reflect the demographics of Doctors of BC members. There are no visible minorities on the Editorial Board, and the names of the current members, listed at the front of the journal, suggest they all have Western European ancestry.

Over the past few years, Doctors of BC instituted a policy where members of any Doctors of BC committee serve a 5-year term, after which they are invited to reapply for the position through the Doctors of BC Nominating Committee. At the same time, the Nominating Committee seeks applications from other Doctors of BC members for the position. This system was developed because it was recognized there was little turnover of members on some committees. The same committee members might serve for 10 or 20 years. The initiative has been successful in getting more Doctors of BC members involved in their association; however, for reasons that are unclear, the Editorial Board of the BCMJ has been excluded from this requirement.

Whereas the efforts of the current Editorial Board are greatly appreciated, the journal could become reinvigorated and more reflective of the opinions and diversity of the membership by encouraging turnover of Editorial Board members using the process described above. Please consider participating in this reform. 
—John Sehmer, MD 
Vancouver

John Sehmer, MD. Term limits for Doctors of BC committees. BCMJ, Vol. 58, No. 4, May, 2016, Page(s) 188-189 - Letters.


Above is the information needed to cite this article in your paper or presentation. The International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE) recommends the following citation style, which is the now nearly universally accepted citation style for scientific papers:
Halpern SD, Ubel PA, Caplan AL, Marion DW, Palmer AM, Schiding JK, et al. Solid-organ transplantation in HIV-infected patients. N Engl J Med. 2002;347:284-7.

About the ICMJE and citation styles

The ICMJE is small group of editors of general medical journals who first met informally in Vancouver, British Columbia, in 1978 to establish guidelines for the format of manuscripts submitted to their journals. The group became known as the Vancouver Group. Its requirements for manuscripts, including formats for bibliographic references developed by the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), were first published in 1979. The Vancouver Group expanded and evolved into the International Committee of Medical Journal Editors (ICMJE), which meets annually. The ICMJE created the Recommendations for the Conduct, Reporting, Editing, and Publication of Scholarly Work in Medical Journals to help authors and editors create and distribute accurate, clear, easily accessible reports of biomedical studies.

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