Prescription for a Healthy Journal

Open access, freely available online T oday the possibilities for a medical journal are almost limitless. The fi rst medical journals refl ected the needs of a closed group of doctors. But medicine, its place in the world, and the dissemination of information have changed utterly. So in starting afresh, what should a new medical journal retain, and what should it ditch? Most obviously, we should throw out the old way of disseminating information. In today's electronic age, it is no more diffi cult, and it is only minimally more costly, to provide access to one million people than it is to one person. So the revolutionary idea of anyone being able to read any article is possible. This idea—open access—which completely challenges the old subscription-based publishing model, is the driving force behind the launch of PLoS Medicine. You can download and distribute articles without restrictions (feel free to make a thousand copies, translate articles into other languages, put articles into books—just give the author proper credit). We have also changed the way we involve the academic community in our journal. Our large global editorial board refl ects the diversity of medicine today and is intimately involved in what we do. In particular, members of the editorial board are a crucial part of our peer review process. As academic editors they, along with a senior editor at the journal, take research papers through the peer review process in a way that we believe provides the most constructive and fair review. We are delighted that members of our editorial board have also shown their support for our journal by submitting papers to us, even before we launched. What will we publish? The research article on malaria in this issue refl ects our priority of publishing papers on diseases that take the greatest toll on health globally. But we will also publish papers reporting a substantial advance in any specialty, whether that advance is in public health, such as the paper on the global burden of disease; drug effects, such as the paper on the effect of HIV drugs on lipids; or the molecular understanding of disease, such as the paper dissecting out the immune responses in lung disease caused by smoking. A good general medical journal should also be a place where the global medical community can discuss together what matters to them. The magazine section of PLoS Medicine will be …