A Message from the Editor

The Price of Information

Intermedic: A Journal on Internet and Medicine, 1(2), Sept/Oct 1997

One of the many seminars I have attended about Internet dealt with a futuristic outlook: the day when the entire planet will be connected to a single, giant computer network. One of the speakers, Michael McDonald, a brilliant researcher and physician with the Everett Koop Foundation, considered what might possibly be the cost of information to the user, in this scenario. The most fascinating concept is that this cost will tend to zero !

This may seem an utopic or even unreal thing, because every one knows that is very costly to collect and to distribute any type of information to the whole world. The traditional economical model of journals, books and databases is to pass the costs to the customer, and add a nice profit margin on the top of it. The business of selling information is one of the most important and vigorous sectors of the economy.

However, there is growing competition among Internet-based projects which aim at offering immense data bases to the public at no cost; and this is making a hard life for those companies which are used to sell information, not give it for free. Let's take and example. The US National Library of Medicine has recently made available on the Internet its huge medical bibliography database, MEDLINE, with more than 9 million items, including abstracts, at no charge (see my paper on Medical Literature Searches on the Internet, in this issue of Intermedic). The costs for building and maintaining this database has run into hundreds of millions of dollars in the past 20 years or so, and they have been entirely footed by the US Federal Government, for the benefit of Mankind as a whole. With this simple move, NLM has nearly decreed bankruptcy overnight for hundreds of companies which lived from selling MEDLINE via CD-ROMs or on-line access !

Another example is our journal, Intermedic. It's available for free for any Internet user, as well as in printed version for more than 10,000 Brazilian physicians; although, as one can imagine, it has a high production cost. As it happens with Intermedic, there are many hundred of free-subscription electronic magazines and journals on the Internet, and the trend is definitely up and going. The publication of Intermedic has been made possible by the financial backing of a forward-looking pharmaceutical company, Searle do Brasil, the generous dedication to work of editors and authors and the support of my University. A publishing house, Lemos Editorial is our partner in this endeavour.

All this leads to a new and intriguing phenomenon, since it creates a deadly difference in relation to those who have decided to ask the user to pay for the information they are providing on the Internet. Whoever charges for information, is going to lose public for those who make it free, unless their product is a highly desirable one (for example, Encyclopaedia Britannica is doing brisk business by selling unlimited access to it''s on-line edition, for only US$ 80 per year. I bought it !). The traditional publishers of printed scientific journals and magazines are scared to death by Internet, and are scrambling to find a viable economical model for it. For them the future is one of cheap information, not zero cost. Each access will cost pennies, but the massive availability will make a lot of cash, they believe. Meanwhile, the costs of subscribing to the on-line version of a famous magazine (such as The New Englaind Journal of Medicine is outrageously high: almost the same price of the printed edition, although they have absolutely no printing and distribution costs regarding Internet.

No doubt, the next years are going to be very exciting and revolutionary for the world of medical information...