The number one goal of this publication is to provide our audience of contamination control professionals the very latest and most useful information available. To do this, each month we provide a unique combination of staff-reported articles and a selection of contributed articles from leading industry experts.
What concerns me of late, however, is the limited number of contributions coming from the user community–you, our readers. While we certainly include the activities, expertise, and opinions of users in our staff-written material, the vast majority of technical article contributions are coming from the vendor/provider community.
I suspect the biggest reason for this is that many of you have simply become so busy actually implementing and managing your contamination and infection control solutions that you don’t feel you have the time available to write and share your accomplishments with the community at large. Of course, this is a legitimate concern, but it’s also a problem, because if successes, experiences, and lessons learned are not being shared, then everyone is operating less efficiently–duplicating efforts and repeating mistakes.
That’s why I’m writing this month to encourage our readers in the user community to record and publish your activities. We’re certainly willing to offer whatever assistance we can to make this as seamless a process as possible. One thing we’re doing right now is adjusting our long-standing editorial policy of not accepting “case history” articles. This policy was implemented because case-history-type articles are normally submitted by writers from the vendor community and tend to be specific to a particular company’s product or service. As such, unless readers already have the specific product described, or intend to acquire it (that’s what advertising is for), the article will have little to no value to them. On the other hand, case histories, or articles describing individual contamination control challenges, experiences, and accomplishments by end users, are extremely valuable to our entire readership.
So, while we will continue to cull out vendor-supplied case histories, this policy will no longer apply to anyone in the user community who wishes to contribute this type of article. By the way, before you call, I’m well aware that most contamination control vendor companies are also users of the technology, and we can work this possible conflict out on a case-by-case basis.
So please, let me and your colleagues in the contamination control community know what you’re doing out there. Remember, it probably won’t hurt to remind people in your own company how important your contributions are, either.
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John Haystead,
Publisher & Editor