A rthur Amman, President of Global Strategies for HIV Prevention (http:⁄⁄www.globalstrategies.org),tells this story:"I recently met a physician from southern Africa, engaged in perinatal HIV prevention, whose primary access to information was abstracts posted on the Internet.Based on a single abstract, they had altered their perinatal HIV prevention program from an effective therapy to one with lesser effi cacy.Had they read the full text article they would have undoubtedly realized that the study results were based on shortterm follow-up, a small pivotal group, incomplete data, and unlikely to be applicable to their country situation.Their decision to alter treatment based solely on the abstract's conclusions may have resulted in increased perinatal HIV transmission."Amman's story shows the potentially deadly gap between the informationrich and the information-poor.This gap is not the result of lack of technology or of money, but of a failure of imagination.We live in the most information-rich era of history, when the Internet allows immediate global dissemination of crucial health information, and the interlinking of online information creates an integrated, living body of information-the ultimate vision of which is the semantic Web (http:⁄⁄www.w3.org).What is preventing such a living Web?For scientifi c and medical information, two obstacles are vested interests and traditions.The role of copyright, which was developed when the dissemination of work was on paper, is crucial.Initially, applying copyright to medical articles protected both the intellectual investment of authors and the commercial investment of publishers.Authors of scientifi c articles handed over their
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A 2006 study studied this question.