HIV Medicine 2005, a medical textbook freely available over the Internet, will be downloaded more than 50,000 times in a year. At a cost of 52 € per copy, global savings (for those who otherwise would have bought the book) or added value (for those who would not have bought it) will exceed 2,500,000 €. The free Internet publication of Influenza Report 2006 will result in even more important savings and/or added value - multiple translations are under way, more than doubling the impact. These two examples demonstrate that the economic implications of open-access publishing are delightfully fascinating. If medical textbooks of an average price of 50 € per copy are downloaded an average 100,000 times a year, savings will be around 5,000,000 € per title and per year. The resulting prospective is vertiginous: producing and freely distributing 100 medical textbooks could save doctors and interested lay people 500,000,000 € per year - half a billion euros!

Bernd Sebastian Kamps is the director of the international Amedeo Literature Project and the founder of Flying Publisher. He is editor of HIV Medicine 2005 and Influenza Report.

Free Medical Information (94 pages, 1.1 MB, Download PDF) shows how doctors can produce and market their own books. Similar projects are now being developed for other themes and Amedeo Challenge offers awards for medical teams who write and publish open access medical textbooks. Medicine is not an unlimited field. The most important subjects can be covered in 100 textbooks. A hundred books - 50,000 pages - give answers to 99% of the questions which crop up in our daily routine as doctors. The world needs a hundred dedicated doctors. We would like the most important medical fields to be covered in freely available textbooks on the internet by the year 2010. The following is a description of how we can achieve this goal. The name of the project is Free Medical Information. If you wish to be informed about new editions, you may subscribe to the FMI Alert. Please check the Copyright Removal Conditions.

Chapter 1 Doctor = Publisher

I have a dream - A change of generations - Communication channels - Book vs. internet - Pioneer projects - Traditional publishing house or the author as publisher? - Cash flow - The world needs 100 doctors

Chapter 2 One hundred doctors

No.1 vs. mediocrity - Fart in a teacup - Commitment - Schedule - Structuring - Internet supplement - Language - Editorial team - Mentor - Time frame - Deadline - Team of authors - Budget

Chapter 3 Getting the train on the track

Book format - Against the light - References - Journalistic handbooks - Styles - Key combinations - Letters to the authors - Kick-off - List of contributors - Bank details

Chapter 4 Behind the scenes

Securing financing - Profit margins - Sponsoring the website - Opening and closing credits - Founding a publishing house - ISBN numbers - Internet domain - Project Center - Spell verification - Negotiations with sponsors

Chapter 5 The home stretch

Keywords - Preliminary publication on the internet site - Final assembly - Citations - Caption - Contents - Index - PDF version - Advertising - Distribution - Ora et labora

Chapter 6 Playground, creativity

Pocket edition - Expansion of the website - Payment of authors' fees - English edition - Removal of copyright - Blogs

Chapter 7 The seventh day

Flying Publisher support fund - Flying Publisher tutoring - Flying Publisher meetings - Second edition - Be part of it

Chapter 8 Appendix

Letter to your authors - Working with Word - Copyright removal