Publishing in the age of the digital doctor.

years. Books and journals have had almost no rivals as vehicles of scientific progress and practical instruction. From Darwin’s On the Origin of Species to Sir William Osler’s The Principles and Practice of Medicine and the peer-reviewed periodical, this mode of knowledge dissemination has served us remarkably well. But the tradition of publication requires continuing support, and the next generation must be taught the special methods of the field. There is a deep interconnection and interdependence between the revolution in medicine unleashed by genomics and the revolution in communications unleashed by digital technology; progress in one will engender further progress in the other and vice versa. Emerging communications technology was integral to the Human Genome Project in almost every phase. The ability of the Web to archive vast amounts of data, to enable retrieval and sharing and duplication of results, is not simply a matter of creating a bigger and faster Library of Alexandria. The Web is confronting—revolutionizing—old ways of academic work. Andrea Rinaldi has noted that “Modern technologies and web-based dissemination ... challenge the classical structure of the ‘standard’ paper—introduction, methods, results, and discussion—as web formats allow data and text to be separated and recombined by the reader, enriched through the use of electronic tagging and mark-up, and linked to external resources, with a general increase in interactivity” 2. The best course of action has always been to take advantage of the powerful promise of each revolution in coding with a careful regard for helping to build the best of all possible futures. And this is what is underway at journals such as Current Oncology that have adopted the Open Access publishing model, thus seizing the vast opportunities of our digital era. This journal is now going back to the future again in an open information age by providing a forum for students, fellows, and their mentors. I am delighted that the first article published in this spirit is a case report and literature review from McGill University by Khashayar Esfahani, Phil Gold, Susan Wakil, René P. Michel, and Susan Solymoss. Their report chronicles KEY WORDS