• journals
• developing countries

What a marvellous and generous move to provide free access to BMJ journals and especially to Gut for doctors working in poor countries in the third world. The main problem is the subscription rate. The annual personal subscription for Gut is $199 which is more than one month's salary for a professor in the Sudan.

We have tried several means of obtaining journals, the most useful of which was our friends from the UK sending us their journals after they had read them. They do reach us, but usually in the form of a big parcel of six months' worth of the BMJ or Lancet, which is not easy to get through with the overwhelming clinical duties of most doctors working in developing countries.

Now with the rapid advances in telecommunications, most provincial hospitals have access to the Internet. In our hospital, all doctors have free access to the Internet through a dedicated computer, which has proved to be very helpful.

It is a genuine and very helpful step from Gut and we hope that other journals (for example, Gastroenterology) or other organisations such as the Cochrane Collaboration and Embase.com will follow your golden footsteps.