• journal update

In the anxious times prevailing as I write this, it seems strange to be talking about a “good year” during 2001. I hope that the world situation might be better when you read this in January 2002 but I fear it will not be.

Occupational and Environmental Medicine has had a generally good year during 2001. We made a modest contribution towards bridging the information divide between developed and developing countries, by arranging free access to the on line Journal for anyone in the World's 50 poorest countries. Some clever software called Digital Island identifies the source of a visit to the site and allocates free access as appropriate. My own contribution was to check in from Bangladesh and confirm that it worked. So far there have been relatively few “hits” on the site taking advantage of the free access; this shows that we need to do more to pull in readers from the developing world. We also need to do a lot more to increase the number of papers we publish from developing countries. Along with some of the other BMJ specialist journals, this is a challenge we are going to address in the coming year. It will not be enough to invite submissions. We need to help …