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RIP: The Medscape Journal of Medicine, an open-access pioneer, stops publishing new papers

A pioneering medical journal has fallen victim to the dramatic and wrenching changes that are overtaking the publishing industry: The Medscape Journal of Medicine (MJM), the first electronic-only open access general medical journal,* will no longer publish new papers, Editor in Chief George Lundberg and colleagues announced yesterday.

Open access is a movement to make studies available for free online, instead of charging taxpayers who funded the research (and others) to read them. The first for-profit open access publisher, BioMed Central (BMC), was founded in 2000 and launched BMC Biochemistry, its first journal, in July of that year. A BMC parent company made articles in existing journals open access in 1999.** BMC was sold to Springer last year. The Public Library of Science (PLoS), the first nonprofit open-access publisher, was also founded in 2000, but did not publish its first journal, PLoS Biology, until October 2003.

Uranium as a solution to the world's economic crisis?

One of the great things about working at the longest-continually published magazine in the U.S.—born in 1845—is thumbing through the archives. Our environment reporter, David Biello, was thumbing through some bound volumes earlier this week, and he came across a gem from our February 1947 issue.

The piece, which has no byline, is quite timely, despite being more than 60 years old. It hits two of today's growing crises square on—energy and the economy—by suggesting a replacement for silver and gold monetary standards:

Uranium.

That's right. Less than two years after the U.S. dropped atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki, someone thought it would be a good idea to back currency with a radioactive substance. So instead of gold, Fort Knox would be filled with uranium. Or, today, maybe Yucca Mountain, the proposed nuclear waste storage facility in Nevada, could do double duty as a currency standard warehouse. (Worth noting: The "ultrasecure uranium warehouse of the future" is in Oak Ridge, Tenn., just a few hundred miles from Fort Knox in Kentucky.)


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