From Paper to Platform: How a Legacy Journal is Reimagining Public Health Communication in the Digital Age

 For nearly half a century, a quiet but persistent force in public health has chronicled the rise and evolution of infectious disease management in Australia. Communicable Diseases Intelligence (CDI), a publication as enduring as it is understated, has tracked everything from the earliest waves of HIV to outbreaks of zoonotic infections in the remotest corners of the continent. But now, this venerable archive of epidemiological memory is doing something uncharacteristically bold — it’s reinventing itself in the digital age.

The journal, once housed deep within government servers and read primarily by researchers and policy-makers, is now stepping into a new era with a move to an open-access platform. This transformation isn't just a technical migration. It’s a symbolic gesture — an invitation to a broader global audience, a repositioning of health knowledge into the public domain, and a timely evolution in the face of accelerating global health challenges.

For those outside the world of infectious disease research, this may seem like a niche shift. But for anyone who lived through a pandemic, whose children required emergency immunizations, or whose family faced a sudden hospital lockdown due to norovirus, the value of real-time, trustworthy, and freely accessible public health data isn’t abstract — it’s deeply personal.

The platform chosen for this transformation is Open Journal Systems (OJS), hosted by the interim Australian Centre for Disease Control (CDC). On paper, it’s a move from one database to another. In practice, it’s a sweeping overhaul in how knowledge is shared, accessed, and validated in the age of open science and cross-border disease management.

Imagine a rural general practitioner in the wheatbelt region of Western Australia. Until recently, her access to timely epidemiological data was limited, often buried behind bureaucratic walls or reliant on delayed updates from centralized institutions. Today, with just a few taps on her tablet, she can review peer-reviewed surveillance updates on the spike of Ross River virus cases in neighboring shires. She can compare patterns year over year, triangulate symptoms with new diagnostic guidelines, and prepare her clinic for what might come next. That’s not just improved access — it’s better medicine.

The ripple effects of this shift extend beyond clinicians. Take James, a postgraduate student in epidemiology at a university in Melbourne. His research focuses on the patterns of antimicrobial resistance in regional health districts. In the past, acquiring reliable data would have required months of formal requests and data access approvals. Now, he can explore an expansive digital archive that includes over 2,650 surveillance reports and research articles, offering him an immediate and comprehensive view of the public health landscape he hopes to influence.

Open access in this context isn’t just a philosophical stance — it’s a practical one. It lowers the barrier between knowledge and action. Public health surveillance, when locked behind paywalls, isn’t just inaccessible to the public — it’s effectively inert. By contrast, when a local council worker, a school nurse, or even a concerned parent can scan the latest research on communicable diseases in their area, knowledge becomes a form of community empowerment.

One striking feature of the newly accessible CDI archive is its sheer scope. Covering topics from AIDS to zoonoses, it reflects how the human relationship with infectious disease is both historical and ongoing. These articles are not relics; they’re records of hard-earned understanding. They track the socio-political nuances of disease response, the evolving methods of diagnostic innovation, and the granular, location-specific data points that inform high-level health strategy.

Among the more compelling insights from the journal are those moments where science meets everyday life — the stories of how a localized outbreak in a childcare center led to national review of hygiene protocols, or how indigenous communities collaborated with regional health departments to contain a hepatitis A flare-up with dignity and cultural sensitivity. These are not just data points; they’re stories of human resilience, cooperation, and the fragile balancing act of modern health systems.

In many ways, this platform move is a response to a world that has shifted irreversibly. Since 2020, the global population has been acutely re-sensitized to the role of epidemiological data. Terms like “case fatality ratio,” “R-naught,” and “surveillance lag” became dinner table conversation. People now expect more from their public health institutions — more transparency, faster communication, and clearer access to facts amid the noise.

But digitization alone doesn’t guarantee relevance. What gives this transition weight is the credibility of CDI’s past and the integrity of its editorial future. Having been housed for decades within the Department of Health, Disability and Ageing, CDI carries with it the institutional memory and methodological rigor that are essential for meaningful health reporting. Under the stewardship of the interim CDC, there’s a renewed commitment to ensuring that the science remains sound, peer review remains meticulous, and new voices — particularly from underrepresented regions and communities — are welcomed into the fold.

For high-level policy strategists, this moment is also a case study in how legacy systems can evolve without erasing their past. The move to OJS doesn’t discard CDI’s historical identity — it amplifies it. It allows archived reports to be read alongside new commentary, old hypotheses to be tested against new data, and researchers across borders to find common ground in the language of disease metrics and public health planning.

There’s a certain poetry in the idea that the same publication which reported on Australia's earliest national immunization schedules now lives in a format that’s accessible to a teenager in Brooklyn writing a school paper on global vaccine equity. Or that an infectious disease modeler in Geneva, searching for longitudinal case data on avian flu, might stumble upon a 1993 CDI report that changes her assumptions entirely.

At a more intimate level, the platform shift reflects something broader about our era — a growing demand for clarity, access, and participation in the institutions that shape our well-being. Health is no longer something administered solely from the top down. It's a collaborative project, and informed citizens are its most effective contributors.

That ethos is embedded in the new face of CDI. While its branding may still be modest, the ambition is sweeping. It envisions a world where disease surveillance is as common a utility as weather forecasting, where insights from microbiology labs reach frontline responders in real time, and where a parent in Perth can read about a pertussis cluster in Queensland and decide — with a sense of calm, not panic — whether it’s time to schedule a booster shot.

The accessibility of such data can also shift how we talk about wellness more broadly. Too often, conversations about wellness are framed through the lens of individual choice — exercise, diet, mindfulness. But wellness is also a collective construct. It’s built on the foundation of shared information, mutual accountability, and systems that work transparently across class, geography, and political orientation.

Consider the example of Leanne, a mother of two living in a suburb of Sydney. She’s not a scientist, nor a policy-maker. But after the pandemic, she became more curious — and frankly, more anxious — about local disease trends. Now, she checks the new CDI platform every few weeks, not out of fear, but out of a growing sense that being informed is part of being a responsible parent. She recently shared an article on antimicrobial resistance in children with her GP, prompting a thoughtful conversation that may well influence how her children are treated in the future.

These aren’t abstract benefits — they’re grounded in lived experience. They reflect a world in which the lines between researcher and reader, between policymaker and parent, are blurring in productive ways. And in that blurring lies an opportunity — to democratize not just data, but trust.

If the early years of CDI were about archiving knowledge, its future appears to be about activating it. In a world increasingly defined by interconnection — where one traveler’s fever can become a city’s crisis — the value of timely, accessible, and trustworthy communicable disease intelligence is difficult to overstate.

So as the journal embarks on this new chapter, there’s cause for optimism — not only in the improved technology or broader reach, but in the idea that science, when placed in the public square, can do what it was always meant to do: illuminate, guide, and ultimately, protect.🧬🩺🌍