Just when you thought I would break my new year’s resolution to post at least one blog a week in 2008, here I am getting getting an entry in at the 11th hour (the week’s not over yet, folks!)…

So, if you’ve been following the Med 2.0 space over the last year or so, you will probably be very aware of the Cambridge, MA based startup called Sermo — “…the fastest-growing community created by physicians, for physicians“.

There’s been no shortage of press coverage on Sermo over the past year or so and it’s even been called the ”MySpace for Physicians” (which IMHO is an unfortunately misnomer, but gets the point across). Currently, Sermo currently has around 50,000+ members and they’re growing at a rapid rate; both in terms of subscribers (something like 2,000 a week) as well as partnerships (AMA, FDA, Pfizer, etc.).

On JAN 15th, Sermo announced their latest partnership deal with Nature Publishing Group (the renowned scientific/medical journal publishers). Here’s a synopsis from the press release:

In this collaboration, NPG will add “Discuss on Sermo” links to the online versions of articles in 12 of its leading medical journals, including Nature Medicine, Nature Clinical Practice Cardiovascular Medicine, and Leukemia. These links will allow US physicians reading the journals to create or join discussions of the articles in Sermo’s physician-only knowledge-sharing community. On Sermo, discussions of research articles include both free-text comments and user-generated surveys, capturing the depth of individual observations and opinions as well as aggregating the collective wisdom of its 50,000 physician members.

To best facilitate information sharing, NPG will make the full text of all articles from a selection of its medical journals freely available to registered users of Sermo, which is itself freely available to all licensed US physicians. In return, Sermo will allow NPG to use the Sermo community to better inform and extend the relevance of its articles. The partnership is Sermo’s first with a commercial publisher.

I think this is going to be a great partnership for Sermo and really complements NPG’s commitment to science communication and collaboration as well, including challenging the traditional peer-review process. And with NPG allowing free access to it’s medical journals, I can only imagine what this will do for Sermo’s already popular sign-up rate.