PLoS Medicine— A Medical Journal for the Internet Age

he Internet is awash with medical information.Eight hundred million people have direct access to the Internet [1], and in the United States over 60% have searched for health or medical information on the Web [2].Go to any search engine and type in the name of a disease or drug, and you will be directed to hundreds of sites, ranging from the sound and useful to the quackish and dangerous.Google "medical" and you get 85 million pages, "drug," 40 million, and "health," 230 million.But something is conspicuously missing.The most reliable medical information on the Internet-the contents of peer-reviewed medical journals-is hidden from the public and most of the world's physicians.Although most medical journals are available online, their publishers limit access to those who choose, and can afford, to pay for access.This should not, and need not, be so.In the 19th and early 20th centuries independent physicians and small medical societies, interested in making the best new medical knowledge available to doctors, students, and the public, began to publish general medical journals containing case reports, ideas for new treatments, and the results of medical experiments.These pioneers took advantage of the best available technology for disseminating information, printing titles like The Lancet, The New England Journal of Medicine, and The Journal of the American Medical Association on cheap paper and selling them to subscribers at a few pennies a copy.For more than a century, printed journals like these were the dominant means of conveying medical knowledge around the world.But technology has changed.The Internet is now the most economical and effi cient conduit for the delivery of information to most places.Publishers of medical journals realize this-when the Internet took off, they took their journals online.