E-DRUG: PLoS Medicine is 5 this week
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PLoS Medicine is 5 this week: the past, the future, and the competition result
Public Library of Science (PLoS), Open Access to health information
PLoS Medicine is 5 years old this week. To celebrate this anniversary and to highlight the crucial importance of open access in medical publishing, we've held a competition to find the best medical paper published under an open-access license anywhere (not just in PLoS) since our launch. The competition closed on the 15th October, 2009 (PDT) and the winning paper was authored by Goodarz Danaei, Majid Ezzati and colleagues. Dr. Danaei commented that "this paper shows that hundreds of thousands of premature deaths can be avoided in the United States each year by addressing preventable dietary, lifestyle and metabolic risk factors like salt intake, smoking, and high blood pressure. Its very purpose, to inform policy decisions, meant that there should be no limits to who can access it." Read more about how the competition was organized on our community blog Speaking of Medicine.
The editorial team have also taken the time to reflect on the past five years and what the future holds, both for medical publishing and the publishing landscape as a whole. Two editorials this year layout their thoughts; the April 2009 editorial, A Medical Journal for the World's Health Priorities, discussed a revamped journal scope which focuses on the diseases and risk factors that cause the greatest loss of life and disability
worldwide; and the October 2009 editorial, Five Years of Access and Activism, reflects on some of the issues we have covered since we launched.
Details of winning paper:
Citation: Danaei G, Ding EL, Mozaffarian D, Taylor B, Rehm J, et al. (2009) The Preventable Causes of Death in the United States: Comparative Risk
Assessment of Dietary, Lifestyle, and Metabolic Risk Factors. PLoS Med 6(4): e1000058. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000058
LINK TO ARTICLE: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000058
Read about the competition and the other nominated papers on Speaking of Medicine:
http://speakingofmedicine.plos.org/2009/10/20/plos-medicine-is-5-this-week/
October 2009 PLoS Medicine Editorial:
Citation: The PLoS Medicine Editors (2009) Five Years of Access and Activism. PLoS Med 6(10): e1000167. doi:10.1371/journal.pmed.1000167
LINK TO ARTICLE: http://www.plosmedicine.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pmed.1000167
CONTACT:
PLoS Medicine Editors
medicine_editors@plos.org