Forget Myspace. You should see what the Web 2.0 revolution is doing to medical journals. There’s a contest to name the most important medical advance since 1840 over at the venerable British Medical Journal. (Results to be posted on Jan. 18) The ultra-exclusive New England Journal of Medicine has a betablog in which they ask doctors and other readers how often they turn to Wikipedia for medical information. And Nature’s experiment in the social bookmarking of research articles just keeps growing.

But first prize still has to go to the Public Library of Science journals (plos.org), which jumped on the open-access research bandwagon early, and has been shaking up the paid-subscription journals ever since. No special licenses are required for doctors in poor countries to read high-quality PloS articles in full. As long as readers have internet access, the articles are free.

PloS.org’s latest offering: PloS One, where research articles from a wide variety of disciplines undergo minimal pre-publication review. The heavy lifting comes from what the editors call “community peer review,” which is done completely transparently through reader annotations on the web.

As long as you have the $1250 publication fee and your paper demonstrates sound scientific methodology and hasn't appeared anywhere else, you can publish your research in PLoS One. Whether anyone reads it, or more importantly comments on it, thereby raising the profile of your paper, is another story.

And the greatest medical advance since 1840? Gotta be antibiotics. No wait, improved sanitation. No, no—vaccines, yeah that's right vaccines.

The best thing about Web 2.0—you can vote as often as you like.

—Christine Gorman/New York

Update (1/11/07): The New England Journal has been available for free on the Internet since 2001 to folks with IP addresses in 120 of the world's poorest countries. Also their beta site is not really a blog, as I explain in another post.