Suppose There Were No Printers

• Electronic journals
• Photography
• Publishing
• Printing

The biologist Edward Wilson has said that “a discovery does not exist until it is safely reviewed and in print” (1). That's a strong statement, but it says much about why print publication is important, which, in turn, explains why the print version of Annals looks different beginning with this issue. With the expert help of Roger Gorman, from Reiner Design Consultants in New York, we set out nearly a year ago to create a journal that is more readable, more graphically consistent, and more interesting to look at—but still recognizable as the Annals we've known. We are pleased with the result, but what ultimately matters is what our readers think. We invite your comments.

Among other changes in the journal's format, photographs of people now appear on the cover. Medicine, for all its scientific brilliance, is ultimately about the care of people. But until we began our Personae section a year or so ago, the pages of Annals, like those of most clinical journals, contained only abstractions: words, numbers, graphs. The people (aside from those in some drug advertisements) were missing. The photographs on the cover remind us of the balance between people and science that is medicine at its best.

The “clip-and-file” abstracts that were previously tucked away in the front and back of the journal have been rendered obsolete by electronic information systems. We've replaced them with our new Summaries for Patients: concise summaries, in everyday language, of the research articles published in each issue of Annals, created to make those studies understandable to …