Dear all,

at the suggestion of Gwinyai I would like to discuss whether or not we would include in our Author guidelines for future submission the advice and/or requirement to authors to add a Plain language summary.

This has already been included in https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Images_of_Aerococcus_urinae ; but many other recent articles don't have this.

I think in the spirit of Wikipedia and to make any topic accessible to the widest possible audience I would welcome these. Several big journals already use these e.g. Cochrane, JAMA, Ann Intern Med etc. have summaries for patients. Only sometimes they are written by the authors themselves and sometimes by the Editors/Journal.

I support adding Plain language summaries to the Author Instructions.

PS: I also added a topic for this discussion online: https://en.wikiversity.org/wiki/Talk:WikiJournal_of_Medicine/Publishing#Plain_language_summaries

with kindest regards,

Michaël