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Critical public health online

It has become a truism to say we are living in a shrinking world, or a global village, with globalisation affecting every facet of modern life (Scholte, 2000; Bech, 2005). This is as true of the public health field as of other aspects of contemporary society (Lee & Collin, 2005; McMichael & Beaglehole, 2000). One of the underlying drivers of globalisation has been the revolution in information technology, in particular the growth and increasing speed of the internet. We have access to a wider range of information and knowledge than ever before, often with virtually instantaneous access. Many of us are members of electronic public health discussion groups or email lists, receive electronic public health newsletters and e-notices of conferences, new books and journal tables of contents. Inevitably this has changed the way public health practitioners and academics access and use public health literature. Increasingly we are utilizing online search engines such as Google Scholar (http://scholar.google.com/) and PubMed (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/ entrez/) to find and download individual articles of interest to us. Fewer and fewer of us now subscribe to and read through whole paper issues of journals, if we ever did. Indeed, many academic institutions are cancelling their paper subscriptions to journals and prioritising their scarce library resources on collections of e-journals. The benefits of this technological revolution are undoubted. Whereas once one might spend weeks visiting libraries, photocopying dog-eared bound volumes or waiting further weeks for interminable inter-library loans to arrive, now the latest research is available at the click of a mouse. Of course the well recognised downside of the information technology revolution is that as well as having access to more information than ever before, we also have to try to manage it. And too often public health practitioners and academics face the challenge of information overload. This can range from receiving hundreds of not always wanted emails a day, to the availability of so much research literature at one’s fingertips that one is swamped by it. At the extreme, too much information can be as dysfunctional as too little. Thus information and knowledge management have become new core public health skills (Yasnoff et al., 2000). As are other journals, Critical Public Health is seeking to respond to this new reality of balancing increased expectation for instant access with the need to manage public health information and knowledge. Electronic subscriptions to Critical Public Health are increasing, particularly from the libraries of academic institutions, and those of you with institutional e-subscriptions are probably already practiced at downloading Critical Public Health articles of interest. For those without a subscription, there is a facility on the