A long time ago, the USM medical school published a bulletin entitled Diagnosa. At the time I didn't have any idea what the word meant. I knew the word 'diagnosis' but this was 'diagnosa'. I had thought it was a strange disease. For a long time I thought about that strange word - Diagnosa.
I never published in Diagnosa simply because I didn't like the name Diagnosa. After some time Diagnosa was changed to The Malaysian Journal of Medical Sciences (MJMS). This new name is much better than Diagnosa.
But MJMS is based in our medical school which is far away from all the medical excitement and progress in Klang Valley and all the big cities. I was studying how small publications could ever make it to the global arena. I studied mainly PubMed and some of the other elite universities' databases, mostly in the US as I didn't know most of the universities outside the USA.
Once I found that online listing and presence was possible for a small journal like the MJMS, I wrote to the Dean; at the time the Dean was Prof. Dr Mafauzy Mohamed. He was my mother's former high school student. Prof. Mafauzy was 50-50 about the idea. So I wrote again and begged him to consider online listing of the TOC in MJMS. We got Bioline International to host our MJMS FOC. It was a slow beginning as many researchers did not know about MJMS, and that it was already online. Access to MJMS was reported back to the medical school by Bioline International.
We also included all our conference abstracts from the annual National Conference on Medical Sciences (NCMS) - usually held every May/June. When I was in charge of the NCMS as its webmaster, I hosted lovely pictures of Kota Bharu too. That became an eye opener and we all got excited. One thing led to another.
Now we have MJMS online at NCBI and the NCMS has its own website somewhere. So, over a period of approximately 15 years from the birth of Diagnosa, we made it to the Internet, of course with the cooperation of many bodies. Bioline International is really great.
This is my PhD student's article published in MJMS and accessible at NCBI:
He is in Facebook. He published 8 articles for his PhD. He also published a book which is available at Amazon.com. He is now an editor of his own university's journal (Medical Journal of Bangladesh), and the best thing is, his journal is also online somewhere; he learned how we did it and he did it for his university. It makes me really happy that even remote places like our medical school in Kelantan has made its presence in the greater global sphere of knowledge.
I have not looked at ISI, SCOPUS, etc.
We also have a research bulletin which I think should go online. I am an author there but I haven't written anything so far.
I'm also looking at whether Patient Education materials can be made available online and to a wider audience.
