Guidelines for posting to the Forum of the American College of Medical Toxicology

Goals and Objectives
The ACMT Forum is a medium designed to promote the dissemination of information to medical toxicologists online. It is an arena of discussion and debate, allowing for sharing of interesting cases, novel presentations and new exposures and information.

Access
Information that optimizes patient care should be free. Access is provided for all ACMT members (regardless of payment status), as well as those approved members of certain other organizations and professional societies. This includes members of AACT, AAPCC, APAMT, SOFT. Other organizations may be added at a later date following board consideration.

In order to obtain access, the non-ACMT member applicant for a Forum membership must submit an application online which must be approved by the Membership Committee. An account will then be created to allow for password protected access to the Forum.

Membership in the ACMT Forum may be revoked for inappropriate posts that violate the letter or spirit of these guidelines.

Content
The Forum is sub-divided into multiple sub-forums to allow for separation of content. Each sub-forum is a general area of related posts and threads. It is the responsibility of the person posting the message to select the appropriate sub-forum for their post, subject to the oversight of the Forum moderator. The number of sub-forums has been pared down from the previous iteration, although expansion as need arises is always a possibility.

Posts should be relevant to medical or other toxicologists, and may include demographic, diagnostic, or management issues, public health concerns, or forensic topics. Additional topics suitable for posting may include news items of toxicologic interest, general announcements, or job announcements for positions relevant to members of the Forum. Research surveys posted through the ACMT Forum must follow the process and approval as outlined below: Distribution of Research Surveys to ACMT Members

All posts must be HIPAA compliant and not contain any protected health information concerning a potentially identifiable patient.

Posting of copyrighted material, such as journal articles, is subject to all relevant regulations and laws (e.g., “fair use,” see this site) and should generally be avoided unless permission is obtained.

No posts shall contain libelous, defamatory, inappropriate, insensitive, offensive, or knowingly false statement, nor messages that can be construed as a restriction of trade, antitrust, or other illegal activity. No posts shall be made in a fraudulent manner, such as impersonating another person or entity.

No posts shall knowingly contain viruses or other potentially malicious software or code.

Privacy
It is the expectation of members who post to the Forum that their comments are for internal use by the medical toxicology and related communities for clinical, educational, professional, and scholarly purposes. Content posted on the Forum should not be distributed beyond this scope or used for other purposes without permission of both the poster and ACMT. Any questions about the appropriateness of external use should be directed to the Forum Moderator at .

Notification
With the current incarnation of the Forum, there are multiple methods for obtaining information about new postings. For detailed instructions and video tutorials on the use of the Forum, and its various notification options, please see the tutorial pages.

Briefly, the first method involves an email digest. This is a cumulative email of all posts that are made either daily or weekly. In this format, the Forum member selects to receive no email notification, a daily email notification or a weekly email notification.

The second method is accessing the Forum directly online through the usual login procedure as desired. This is an appropriate method to access the information on the Forum if one selects to receive no email notifications.

A third method of notification utilizes RSS. To learn more about RSS, and to get started using this "real-time" notification system, please see the tutorial pages.

Forum vs Membership Email
Any item of importance that needs either immediate attention (e.g., obituaries) or is necessary to be viewed by the membership as a whole (e.g., meeting announcements, grant applications) should be sent to the ACMT Central Office () to be distributed via membership email. An analogous posting may be made on the Forum to target non-members of ACMT and/or as reminders for ACMT members.

Disclaimer
“The views expressed within are those of the author and do not necessarily represent the position of the American College of Medical Toxicology. All posts, messages and forums are considered privileged communication and are confidential. It is not appropriate to use Forum discussions for personal or professional gain for yourself, an employer, or another person or organization, without written permission from ACMT and/or the original author.”

Guidelines for Distribution of Research Surveys to ACMT Members

Purpose
To facilitate the process by which surveys are administered to ACMT members through the ACMT Forum. The intent is to ensure that only relevant and quality surveys are administered with an appropriate frequency. This will be balanced with the need to allow member researchers to collect timely data that may aid in research endeavors, grant submissions, or membership issues/practice patterns.

This approval process is important as the use of the ACMT Forum may be construed as implying endorsement of the survey by the ACMT.

This process will be implemented in a monthly fashion.

NO OTHER NON-ADMINISTRATIVE SURVEYS WILL BE DISTRIBUTED THROUGH ACMT WITHOUT UNDERGOING THIS PROCESS

Eligibility
Surveys submitted to the ACMT must meet the following criteria:

Developed and conducted by a member in good standing of ACMT
Not for commercial profit
Free from undue bias, as defined by the ACMT conflict of interest policy
Funding must be in the form of an unconditional/unrestricted educational or research grant, governmental grant, or departmental or personal money. A granting agency must be at arms length from the grantee.
Relevant to the interests of ACMT members, impact on patient care, or practice of medical toxicology

Process
Applications and a copy of the survey should be sent to the ACMT Central Office at

The ACMT Research Committee will review both the application and the survey. The survey will be reviewed with respect to the following components:

Goals and intentions
Methodology*
Relevance to medical toxicology
Appropriateness for the membership of ACMT
Quality of the survey including clarity, length and flow
Future plans
Justifiable time sensitivity

* The review process will focus on methodology, such as that described by Burns et al. in CMAJ, 2008: 179(3); 245-252.

The ACMT Research Committee will make an appropriate recommendation (approval or rejection) to the Executive Committee. A constructive explanation of a rejection should be included that will be provided to the author. The Executive Committee has the right to alter the research committees recommendation for extenuating or expedient circumstances.

A survey may be submitted up to three times (two revisions) under most circumstances (e.g. invited for another revision by the research committee chair or executive committee).

The survey will then be posted to the ACMT Forum via the Forum Moderator.

All submissions will require the signing of a conflict of interest disclaimer on the accompanying application. This will be reviewed by the Research Committee and Executive Committee prior to final decision making.

Results
All successful applicants will be required to report the survey response rates on a weekly basis once the survey has been completed. This information should be provided as an excel spreadsheet to allow for future analysis that will enable the Research committee to determine the optimal survey spacing and frequency and interval of reminders. This data should include information regarding the timing of repeat mailings. A maximum of 3 reminder emails can be sent. The survey should be completed within 6 weeks of first distribution.