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CMAJ
CMAJ - June 13, 2000JAMC - le 13 juin 2000

Electronic wonderland

CMAJ 2000;162:1663

See response from: P. Singer
Peter Singer laid out a very intriguing scenario in his article on the future of medical journals [Commentary].1 Certainly many of the developments he outlined are here or will come true in the foreseeable future for some users of medical literature. The key words, however, are "future" and "some users." In many ways we are not into the dawn of a new information millennium in terms of equitable access to electronic medical literature. With health care and library budgets being continuously cut, the costs of the ever-changing technology are often beyond the means of many. Knowledge may be a great leveller, but access to information is not always equal.

Singer shows some naïveté in stating that everyone — authors, publishers, advertisers and subscribers — will be "delighted" with the new electronic publishing medium. Vested interests and economic imperatives are not that easily shifted by the glimmer of technology. And to state that subscribers will be grateful to pay $200 per year for a journal shows a singular lack of understanding of the current pricing realities of periodical publishing. One doubts that the major publishers will just roll over and forsake the accumulation of profit in the interests of humanity. With due regard for his refreshing sense of hope, I might suggest that Singer pay equal attention to the increasingly dire situation in many of our academic and hospital libraries. Budgets decrease annually in relation to the real cost of delivering ever-growing amounts of information by increasingly sophisticated and often costly means. Let's get the basic methods of knowledge transfer down pat before going off on an enthusiastic tangent about the electronic wonderland that awaits us.

John Tagg
Health Disciplines Library
West Park Hospital
Toronto, Ont.

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Reference
  1. Singer PA. Medical journals are dead. Long live medical journals. CMAJ 2000;162(4):517-8.

© 2000 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors