Is there a need for a new journal devoted to preventive medicine?

It is axiomatic that there has never been so much research productivity as in the present time. Not only are there more trained scientists alive and productive today than at any other point in history, but the last 25 years have also brought ever increasing gains in the speed and quantity of information delivery and in our ability to store scientific knowledge electronically. This is certainly true of medical knowledge as well, and by extension, of the scientific discoveries and knowledge translation insights that help society to avert illness, prolong life, and promote health for individuals and their communities. Therefore, the answer to the question in the title of this editorial is an unequivocal ‘yes’, if we assume quite simplistically that the exponential gains in research productivity represent knowledge that is all of high quality and relevance to advance the theory and practice of preventive medicine. A more refined question is: How will this new journal operate? As the founding co-editors of Preventive Medicine Reports (PMR), we bring our new journal to the scientific community at a time when the business of scholarly publishing is being drastically remodeled. The advent of the ‘open access’ concept in academic publishing democratized access to scientific knowledge by making all papers freely available to anyone with an Internet connection, thus eliminating the need for an individual or institution to have a paid subscription. It was able to do so by shifting the costs of publishing to the source of information, i.e., authors, their institutions, and by association, the research funding agencies. Publishing electronically also lowered the costs of being an academic publisher enormously. The ‘open access’ model has begun to abolish the centuries-long inequality in access to knowledge, which had historically placed investigators in developing countries at a major disadvantage relatively to their counterparts in resource-rich settings. This inequality was particularly poignant in preventive medicine. The very countries with the greatest need for access to scientific discoveries that could alleviate their key public health concerns were prevented from doing so because their scientists and academic institutions could not afford it. The enormous success of organizations such as Public Library of Science (PLOS) and Biomed Central (BMC), which devoted themselves entirely as publishers of multiple open-access journals, was the most notable transformation in academic publishing in the last 15 years. One of these journals, PLOS One, went from a respectable 138 papers in its inaugural year in 2006 to become the largest scientific journal in the world and in history, with 31,500 articles published in 2013 alone [1]. To a large extent, the spectacular success of PLOSOne stemmed from its approach of not reaching decisions on whether to prioritize for peer review and publication based on criteria of relevance and interest to readers set a priori by editors and reviewers. With print journal space concerns largely obviated in the new era of electronic publishing, PLOS One's editorial policy is to accept for publication all submissions