by Benedetta Bodini, eanNews Editor, and Letizia Leocani, EAN Website Editor
Dear EAN members, colleagues, and friends,
As readers of eanNews, you are used to hearing from members of the EAN Board in our monthly Executive Page. This month, Prof. Elena Moro, the EAN President, kindly offered the opportunity to us – the eanNews Editor and the EAN Website Editor – to step into the limelight for an update on our recent activities and some insight into our ongoing strategy and philosophy.
We are both members of the EAN Communications Committee and have been in our respective roles since the committee was confirmed following the EAN Congress 2022. Since then, we have been working with a dedicated group of volunteers from the committee (Chair, Matilde Leonardi; Raphael Wurm; Viktoria Papp; and the committee’s RRFS Representative Isabella Colonna; whose names you may recognise from many excellent eanNews articles), on activities, plans, and improvements relating to our respective areas of responsibility: EAN.org and eanNews.org. All of this work has been facilitated by the excellent staff at the EAN Head Office, to whom we would like to offer a special note of thanks!
Considering the level of overlap and interaction between to the two sites, it should be no surprise that we editors collaborate very closely on decisions and initiatives affecting both, working together to ensure that these two major areas of the EAN’s online presence follow a unified strategy and complement each other wherever possible.
As the first port of call for information about the European Academy of Neurology on the internet, EAN.org is of course one of the most crucial tools in our overarching communications strategy. But it is far more than a simple public-facing ‘front page’ for the EAN; it also serves as a valuable open resource, containing repositories of guidelines, recommended papers, and regularly published neurology updates from our many contributing members of the EAN’s Scientific & Coordinating Panels.
One of the most important tasks of the EAN Website Editor is to review and provide feedback on these many submissions, while maintaining a high quality and appropriate balance among the material that is eventually published. Our cooperation with the 28 scientific and four coordinating panels in this process is of course vital to its success and we have made considerable efforts to both streamline and maximise their involvement.
To this end, we have implemented two recent changes. First, we have eliminated the use of deadlines for proposing content, removing the need for submissions to be rushed, and allowing panels to deliver their material to us as soon as it is ready. Not only does this smooth out our workflow across the year, but it also allows for submissions to be published much faster. Second, while previously most categories were only open for panel co-chairs to make submissions, each panel has now been invited to nominate a ‘communication liaison’ who will also be able to carry out certain duties in the name of their panel. We had a very successful meeting with the nominated officers at the EAN Congress 2024 in Helsinki, where we exchanged information about the process and the specific actions they will be enabled to take.
Where EAN.org plays this double role as a traditional website and a scientific resource, the site you are on right now, eanNews, has a separate purpose, aiming to provide a single point of focus for the sense of community among neurologists in Europe. It has a been a central theme of our work over the last two years to try to transmit the idea of eanNews as the place to go to for three major reasons: 1) to read opinions about the latest cutting edge research, provided by experts from the EAN and curated by our editorial team; 2) to keep up to date on news from within the EAN family, such as meeting reports, educational announcements, activities involving residents and students, etc.; and 3) to hear about political and organisational developments, including new partnerships and members societies, advocacy activities, and updates from the elected leaders of this community – specifically the members of the EAN Board.
Consolidating this idea is a process of continuous improvement that includes many incremental steps, one of the most noticeable of which will have been the recent change in name from ‘EAN Pages’ to eanNews, to better reflect the purpose and the content of the platform. Prior to this rebranding, which took effect just before the EAN Congress 2024, we have also been steadily making changes to the interface, making our navigation categories more intuitive and tidying up the front page to provide a cleaner user experience.
In terms of content, one specific area where we have tried to improve in this respect is research. Building on the established Paper of the Month which has been a main feature for many years, last year we introduced a monthly Research Highlights article, bringing readers summaries of the other top papers that made it onto our shortlist for the Paper of the Month. We are also now placing a much stronger emphasis on video content wherever possible, primarily in the form of interviews, to make eanNews a more modern multimedia experience. For example, both of us have had the pleasure of interviewing the former and current Editors-in-Chief, and founding president, of the European Journal of Neurology this year, as contributions to the celebrating the journal’s 30th anniversary in 2024. We were also had the honour of sitting down and chat to the invited speakers in person at the EAN Congress 2024. The resulting interviews were certainly among the highlights of the extensive congress coverage that we provide on eanNews each year and which has also formed the bulk of the content in our official Congress Review e-Book.
Moving forward, both the EAN website and eanNewswill continue to play their important roles in achieving the EAN’s wider aims, and as their respective editors we are both proud to have been entrusted with another two years in our positions. As platforms for the promotion of the EAN’s major projects, both sites are crucial to areas such as the society’s ever-increasing activities in the fields of advocacy and brain health, in building and strengthening relationships between neurological societies throughout Europe, and in supporting other priorities of the EAN leadership.
Finally, we warmly welcome input and submissions, especially from members of EAN Scientific & Coordinating Panels via our submission forms or your panel co-chairs and communication liaisons. We look forward to hearing from you!
Best wishes
Benedetta Bodini, eanNews Editor
Letizia Leocani, EAN Website Editor
