Designed to take advantage of the unique features of electronic communication, it is a peer reveiwed journal which has the goal of presenting free and easily accessed relevent material to dermatologists. Dermatology, like the rest of medicine, is suffering from information overload. It is the glut of scientific articles which has been driving medicine to find new ways of infomation management. Dermatology doesn't need another journal, it needs an improved way of accessing the vast amount of new and existing relevent information. Not necessarily if the journal only seeks to copy traditional paper format.
Computer screens are harder to read and images are of far lower resolution than available on paper.
Used simply to turn pages, the computer is a poor substitute for paper format, but electronic communication also has its own advantages. In order to best utilize advantages of Internet information presentation, the editors first attempted to identify those aspects. Once a list of features was developed, the next attempt was to design new ways of information presentation which depended on those advantages. Over the next few issues of the Journal, those features will be demonstrated.