In 2020, Burt Cagir, MD, Executive Director of Donald Guthrie Foundation, located on the Robert Packer Hospital campus in Sayre, PA,  got the idea to relaunch a version of The Guthrie Journal, which had published previously under different titles from 1931 to 2003.

For most of the 20th century, the journal had played a vital role in the intellectual life of The Guthrie Clinic health system and provided valuable opportunities for continuing medical education for physicians at Guthrie and around the region. As disruptive as the COVID-19 pandemic was, it provided an opportunity to revive the journal.

In 2021, volume 73, number 1 of The Guthrie Journal appeared. It was different than the earlier iterations in several ways. It was

• peer reviewed
• diamond open access (no submission fees or article processing charges)
• online only
• open to submissions from anywhere (not limited to Guthrie-affiliated authors)

University of Toronto Press (UTP) began publishing the journal in April 2023, with Volume 75, Number 1. UTP helped Dr. Cagir realize the dream of digitizing previous volumes to make them accessible online. The journal changed its name with volume 77, number 1, to The Guthrie Clinic Journal of Medicine.

One way in which the new journal was similar to the old is that a medical librarian took on the role of managing editor, and day-to-day management of the journal falls to the medical library.

In this webinar, journal managing editor Mikki Smith will discuss the opportunities and challenges involved in launching a general medical journal in the current publishing landscape and in carrying out a large-scale digitization project that brought 70 years of 20th-century rural health education and provision in NY and PA to a 21st-century audience.

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Presenter:

Mikki Smith, AHIP-S, earned an MLS from the School of Library and Information Science, The University of Iowa, in 2007, and a PhD in Library and Information Science from the iSchool at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign, in 2017. She started as the Medical Librarian at Guthrie, based in Sayre, PA, in 2021, and helped integrate a second library into the Guthrie system with the acquisition of Our Lady of Lourdes Hospital (Binghamton, NY), by Guthrie in 2024. She has been acting as Managing Editor of The Guthrie Clinic Journal of Medicine since 2022, and is currently Supervisor, System Library Services, at Guthrie.