International Collaboration and Communication in Rehabilitation Research

In his 1956 Coulter Lecture, Frederic Jung anticipated that the artificial language Interlingua might become the lingua franca of international scholarly exchange. That has not happened; English is the language of international science, and the journal of the American Congress of Rehabilitation Medicine (ACRM), Archives of Physical Medicine and Rehabilitation, plays a central role in the communication of rehabilitation research. This presidential address traces the development of Archives, with emphasis on trends in contributions from outside the United States. Opportunities for the journal in the near future are sketched, as well as the threat to its economic potential created by Internet journals, open-access journals, and the requirement by government and other research funding agencies that there is free public access to the fruits of the research they sponsor. The activities of ACRM in the international arena (including its first-ever annual meeting outside the US) are sketched, as is the potential for international collaboration in rehabilitation research. The internationalizing of ACRM (under a new name) is offered as a direction for the organization to consider.