Which communities a writer can join between conferences
Between conferences a writer can learn and find company in several places at once: the teaching an institution or an employer already runs, online seminars, the membership associations, small paid communities, informal local groups, and online groups organised around a region, a kind of practice or a stage of career. Which of them suits depends on what the writer wants from it and on where they work. Starting and running a local group of medical writers covers the local groups in detail, which association to join the membership associations, and using an association's webinars and continuing education what an association teaches at a distance.
Use what is near at hand before travelling
The resources nearest to hand are set out in a 2014 account of a medical writer's survival kit. Many institutions offer seminars and other learning opportunities for continuing professional development, and although most are aimed at clinicians, medical writers may be able to use them: one university was about to offer a one-hour session on writing a letter of intent, a step in applying for research grants that can often decide whether researchers are invited to apply at all, and seminars the account's author attended, on writing for biomedical publications and on writing winning grants, supplied useful exercises and printed guides. Such live presentations are usually free or offered at a nominal cost. Online seminars and training sessions, often self-paced or recordable for repeat viewing, help writers stay connected with one another, exchange ideas, follow trends and get updated information from the office or from home, and employers often cover the cost of professional development. The advice is also to look for a local chapter of a medical writing organisation or to start an informal group, and to use the online discussion groups and social networking sites dedicated to medical writing, which serve as a source of contacts, reference guides, examples and practical tips as well as of intellectual stimulation. The Fall 2014 AMWA Journal issue (volume 29, number 3) was converted from its PDF by layout-aware Poppler XML conversion and admitted without content repair, in which figure labels can be inlined into prose, cover and contents columns can interleave, and reference URLs can be malformed or truncated.
An association's own webinars, and who may join them, are described in using an association's webinars and continuing education.
Follow a project's channels as well as an association's
A project can be a learning channel of its own between conferences. The CORE Reference project's monthly news summaries on regulatory reporting and public disclosure moved from email to LinkedIn. The project's account of June 2025 adds what it did around the move. At a lunchtime learn-and-share session at the association's Riga conference on 8 May 2025, its team spoke of plans for a new website, took suggestions for new topics for the news summary, and closed with an open discussion of best practice and tips for the expanded scope of Policy 0070 on its relaunch at its second step; it also reminded attendees that May 2026 would mark the tenth anniversary of the original CORE Reference resources, to be celebrated at the association's Barcelona conference. The team announced a webinar for 11 June 2025, given by a presenter from Privacy Analytics, on statistical anonymisation software that preserves the utility of clinical documents for public disclosure, and taught again its foundation workshop on CORE Reference (DDF38), which shows how granular the clarity and transparency points in the May 2016 manual are. Its LinkedIn page carries the news summaries from January 2025 on, free to everyone and offered for writers' continuing professional development, with the summaries up to December 2024 archived on the project's website, and it points followers to a YouTube video on the project's aims and to QR codes and DOIs for its main resources. The June 2023 issue of Medical Writing (volume 32, number 2, on freelancing) and the June 2025 issue (volume 34, number 2, on communicating with the public) were each admitted from an existing Markdown conversion without content repair; their known limitations are broken ligatures, mangled multi-column tables, interleaved page headers and footers, and figure text represented as marked text.
Choose among the kinds of community
The range open to a freelance was surveyed in a June 2023 journal article by the founder of the MedComms Networking community, whose company also runs a paid subscription service for specialist medical communications freelances. It starts from the practical questions nobody answers for a freelance: where clients come from and whether they will be pleasant to work with, what the contracts they ask for mean, whether professional indemnity and other insurance is needed, what to do about taxes and whether an accountant is needed, who deals with invoices and chases money, who helps when the laptop stops working, the software needs updating or a client imposes its own IT systems, and how to stay current without the training an employer used to provide. Its answer is that the world is full of freelance medical writers, many of them happy to meet occasionally for coffee, cake and gossip, locally in person or online across time zones, and many happy to support each other in an ever more complicated business world.
The membership associations, and how to choose among them, are in which association to join. Between them and the informal groups sit smaller communities that charge a subscription. The article counts its author's own company's workbook for freelances among them. Another, The Anthill, run from Canada, has a paid core membership with an online community platform and regular events, among them work sprints, weekly planning calls, book clubs and study sessions; its case for itself is that it supplies some of the benefits of an office, above all colleagues to chat with, learn from and troubleshoot with, and that deep and trusting relationships form among writers who understand how medical writing works. It caters mostly to freelances, but around 25% of its members are full-time employees who are thinking of going freelance or who want more connection than their company gives them.
The informal local groups, and how they are started and kept going, are in starting and running a local group of medical writers.
Local business communities
In 2010, Biznik combined online networking with member-created local events for entrepreneurs, freelancers and small-business owners. Founded in 2005, it had more than 30,000 members worldwide, about 30% around Seattle, with membership also growing in other cities. Members created profiles about themselves and their businesses, made connections, participated online and organised or attended local events.
The community focused on building businesses rather than finding jobs, expecting more than a résumé and career-advancing connections: members were encouraged to build lasting relationships and share knowledge about growth and success across industries. Freelance medical communicators could participate as small-business owners, exchanging experience about entrepreneurship, growth and efficiency.
A free membership in 2010 included a profile, groups, forum discussions, event hosting, articles others could respond to, imported Twitter updates, Facebook posting and a limited number of direct messages. Paid tiers at $10 or $24 per month offered features including unlimited messages, video sharing, a blog feed and additional visibility.
Join a group online when there is none nearby
In June 2023, Grupo Sudamericano de Medical Writing (GSMW) operated as an informal Spanish-speaking LinkedIn group mainly for South and Latin America. With medical writing as a career still little known in those countries, its primary aims were awareness, networking and training.
Technology now means there are no borders. The article's author, an early adopter of Zoom, arranged online meetings of New Zealand medical writers late at night in Oxford and over morning coffee in New Zealand, until it was clear that the activity was best organised locally; after a couple of years a writer in Australia took it over and it expanded across the region as the Asia Pacific (APAC) MedComms Network, which in her account fills a gap in the region's medical communications community, both for keeping up with trends, best practice and global developments and for building relationships, exchanging ideas and learning from one another. The Coffee Chat Group, run from the USA as a social space for medical writers, has an organiser who meets everyone before they join, aiming for a good mix of beginners, mid-career and veteran writers, with freelances and employees both welcome.
Nothing quite suits everyone, and the article adds two newer groups of very different kinds. After meeting at an in-person MedComms Networking event in 2022, two freelances set up a private LinkedIn group for freelance medical writers based in the UK and Ireland, because shared knowledge and community matter so much in the industry, no existing group was private and restricted to freelance medical writers, and they wanted one tailored more specifically to their needs. Medical writing for beginners and beyond (free resources), a LinkedIn group, had grown past 2,000 members in little more than a year; its founder set it up to celebrate the journey people take to become medical writers and to work together on networking, making personal and human connections, improving how much writers charge for their services, discussing how best to produce content and answering practical questions, in a supportive and safe space where people can discuss their concerns without being judged in the open, connect with others, find job opportunities and try out different paths before deciding which to pursue.
Groups formed around one country's language or market are in medical writing in France.
The article's conclusion is that the medical writing community is expanding globally as the profession becomes more established, that these local and international groups give writers an essential platform to talk, share knowledge and gossip, and that there seems to be something for everyone; a writer who still finds nothing that fits is advised to set something up, and its author offers to help spread the word.