Electronic Journals: Time for a New Paradigm in Biomedical Communication

Abstract

Despite an exponentially increasing knowledge base in the biomedical sciences and revolutionary advances in computer technology and global networking, scientists and health care workers continue to rely on the nineteenth-century medium of print periodicals as the mainstay of information distribution. Multidisciplinary in theory and practice, practitioners of intensive care medicine are particularly in need of a modern and efficient communication and publishing medium. This discussion questions the appropriateness of the current model of commercial print publishing for biomedical communication, finding it inefficient, expensive, and overly restrictive. With the explosive recent growth of the Internet, and the platform-independent World Wide Web, scientists and clinicians now have an opportunity to forge a new paradigm of noncommercial electronic publishing. For a fraction of the cost that the biomedical community is spending currently for our antiquated system, universal access over the Internet to peer-reviewed electronic journals, sponsored jointly by universities, governments, and health care institutions, can be accomplished now.