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NetPrints: eBMJ's poetic battle cry

Where the mind is without fear and the head is held high;
Where knowledge is free;
Where the world has not been broken up into
fragments by narrow domestic walls;
Where words come out from the depth of truth;
Where tireless striving stretches its arms towards perfection;
Where the clear stream of reason has not lost its way
into the dreary desert sand of dead habit;
Where the mind is led forward by thee into ever widening thought and action—
Into that heaven of freedom, my Father, let my country awake.

(from Rabindranath Tagore's Gitanjali)

With this beautiful and inspiring poem, Tony Delamothe, Web Editor of the eBMJ and Editor of http://clinmed.netprints.org launches that Journal's latest evolutionary step: NetPrints

In Tony's own words:

"This week we launch clinmed.netprints.org, an electronic archive where authors can post their research into clinical medicine and health before, during, or after peer review by other agencies.

Resulting from a collaboration between the BMJ Publishing Group and Stanford University Libraries, it will allow researchers to share their findings in full, for free, and as soon as their studies are complete.

Articles will be screened for breaches of confidentiality and libel before we post them. After posting authors may submit them to any peer reviewed journal that will accept submissions that have appeared as electronic preprints. The list of such journals extends far beyond those of the BMJ Publishing Group and is growing daily (see box). Researchers who have retained the right to post their research results after publication in a peer reviewed journal can archive their articles here rather than on possibly more ephemeral institutional or personal websites."

'Health Informatics Europe' welcomes this development with great enthusiasm.  Yet another milestone along the road to bringing knowledge to the common man and woman wherever they happen to be.

The British Medical Journal must be commended for its efforts in shaping the future of bio-medical publishing.

Ahmad Risk
Editor