New ways to disseminate research from NIH and the BMJ

“It's easy to say what would be the ideal online resource for scholars and scientists: all papers in all fields, systematically interconnected, effortlessly accessible and rationally navigable,from any researcher's desk, worldwide for free.”—Stevan Harnad

Three hundred years of print journals have bequeathed us almost the exact opposite of the idealproposed by Harnad, one of the leading thinkers on how the internet will change science. In biomedicine thousands of journals fragment information into largely arbitrary groupings and charge usersfor access. The burgeoning of the world wide web (almost all researchers and three quarters of doctors in the developed world now have access) makes it inevitable that new systems of disseminatingresearch will replace or at least supplement traditional journals. Concrete proposals for new systems are now appearing, with an ambitious one from the National Institutes of Health leading the way. 1 2 We are about toenter a period of what the Austrian-American economist Joseph Schumpeter called “creative destruction,” and only some of us will still be in business at the end. And those of us who still exist will not be doing exactly what we are doing now.