In this month's PLoS Medicine editorial [2], we discuss the public health risks associated with sensationalized media reporting of suicide, including the risk of promoting copycat suicides.

Last week, the PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases editors rejected a clinical trial, without even sending it for peer review, because the trial had been initiated after July 1 2005 and yet the authors had failed to prospectively register it in a clinical trials registry.

I wanted to alert you to an e-mail that is in circulation, advertising an upcoming journal called Scientific Medicine. The e-mail states that the journal ‘comprises of several top-end basic science researchers, practicing clinicians, medical scientists and international journal editors from across the world (Mainly US, Europe and India)’ and then it goes on to name me and Richard Smith (a member of the PLoS Board of Directors) in the list of those involved. However, neither Richard nor I have ever heard of the journal, and we did not give our permission to be named as editorial board members, nor is PLoS or PLoS Medicine in anyway associated with the journal. We have written to the Managing Editor of Scientific Medicine, asking that the journal immediately stops attaching our names to the launch.

One of the more “interesting” experiences of my journalistic career was co-authoring an Op-Ed [9] for the San Francisco Chronicle in 2002 on the lack of evidence for prostate cancer screening using the PSA test.

Here’s another important step forward in the open access movement. Under its new editor Paul Farmer [12] (who is often talked about [13] as a future Nobel laureate), the international journal Health and Human Rights [14] (HHR) has become fully open access.