The author examines the changes brought about by Internet in the complex field of international medical and scientific journals (and psychiatric journals in particular), since online versions of the printed publications have been made available on the Internet. Attention is focused on the surfeit of these scientific journals and on the economic implications of the transformation. The article underlines how the international scientific community has become conscious of its importance in the production of scientific journals and a description of the very innovative Public Library of Science (PLoS) initiative is also given. The author illustrates the possible future functioning of scientific journals, the so-called “Author pays” model, which is still controversial and closes with comments on the increasingly important role played by direct communication between scientific community and citizens, including the use of specific journals and websites.

the Author is the Multimedial Scientific Information Manager of the Bologna Local Health Unit and as such, he may tend to stress the importance of giving National Health Service employees and health workers in general high quality scientific information that is free from conflicts of interest. He receives a salary from from the National Health Service that would not be altered by changes to the international publishing system.

Over the last 2 decades, discourse on the causes of schizophrenia was conducted almost entirely in terms of biological risk factors. This was probably the result of social trends in the research community, and in popular culture, as a wave of techno-optimism promised answers to big human questions in terms of small pixels and even smaller molecules. The human genome project inflated expectations further, and the pharmaceutical industry conspired with the desire of psychiatrists for scientific respectability. ‘Social factors’, whether at macro-societal or locality/family level, came to be seen as ‘fall-out’ from biological mechanisms, a kind of padding to our understanding of human disease. But changes are in the wind. New understandings of the influence of social factors on the long-term outcome trajectories of psychosis, their potential role in risks associated with migration, and recent findings from genetic high risk studies, are raising fresh questions about social factors and causation. This paper does not argue that the evidence (yet) is strong. But after 2 decades of often crudely articulated dualism, it is time once again for social experience to be integrated with more sophisticated theory development and hypothesis testing in the search for the causes of schizophrenia.

the author has received payments from various pharmaceutical companies to deliver lectures and support travel costs to conferences.