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The Book  Download 66 pages, PDF, 1.4 MB Preface 1. BSK 2. The Amedeo Story 3. HIV.NET 4. HIV Medicine 5. Flying Publisher 6. Free Medical Information 7. Amedeo Textbook Awards Perspectives The Awards Preface Rationale Awards Rules and Conditions Application Books Exclusive Sponsorship Donations
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Rationale for Amedeo Challenge High-quality free medical textbooks contribute to the improvement of medical care. Amedeo Challenge will help bring together:
The rationale for the Amedeo Textbook Awards is based on the following assumptions (for more details, see below):
The Amedeo Challenge project is the result of 16 years of activity in medical education. 1991: First edition of a medical textbook about HIV and AIDS. The English version of the 14th edition is available at HIVMedicine.com. The 15th edition will be published in September 2007. 1996: Sixth edition; freely available on the Internet 1998: Launch of Amedeo (> 130,000 subscribers in March 2006) 2000: Launch of Free Medical Journals 2003: Copyright Removal concept (realised for both SARS Reference and HIV Medicine) 2005: Publication of a Theory of Free Medical Publishing 2006: Publication of Influenza Report 2006: Amedeo Challenge Details 1. There is a huge demand for high-quality free medical textbooks. HIV Medicine (> 800 pages) has been downloaded more than 40,000 times since its launch on 29th September 2006. Influenza Report, published in March 2006, was downloaded more than 34,500 times in one year. Tuberculosis 2007 was downloaded more than 25,000 times in three weeks and is expected to be downloaded more than 100,000 in a single year. 2. Somewhere on this planet there are physicians willing to meet this demand. We have had two interesting experiences in this regard. Firstly, the authors of both Influenza Report and SARS Reference agreed to collaborate without being paid. Both websites generated costs (webhosting, domain name reservation), but without financial benefit. When the authors of a third project, HIV Medicine, wrote their chapters, they did so despite knowing that they might not earn a cent. Eventually, the project generated profit that was divided equally among the authors. Secondly, in 2006, we removed the copyright on Influenza Report. As a result, some physicians from around the world translated Influenza Report into 7 languages. Following the same procedure, HIV Medicine has been translated into Russian, Persian, Portuguese, Spanish, and Romanian. The Turkish and Vietnamese editions are expected to be available soon. 3. The number of topics for medical textbooks is finite. The number of potential topics for medical textbooks is limited. 100 topics alone (see the complete list) would probably cover more than 95 % of questions arising in daily medical practice. 4. We are able to find the medical teams who are willing to produce these textbooks. The physicians willing to produce high-quality free medical textbooks exist, but finding them can be as hard as looking for a needle in a haystack. However, finding the needle may simply be a question of numbers. For example, one such big number is represented by the 130,000 subscribers to our Amedeo mailing list who are mainly physicians. The Amedeo mailing is probably amongst the biggest in the medical Internet. It was sufficient to find the translators for Influenza Report, HIV Medicine (see #2) and Palomino, Leão, Ritacco, et al. who published Tuberculosis 2007, a 687-page textbook. 5. Awards will help motivate more physicians to write free textbooks. Physicians are willing to produce medical textbooks for free, but they might be even more willing if they were motivated by some economic incentive. As medical textbooks are typically being produced during the night, over week-ends or on family vacation, the incentive should be at least 20 Euro per page. For a medical textbook of 500 pages, the award should therefore be at least 12,500 Euro. 6. The Textbook Awards will be financed by public donations and exclusive industry sponsorships. 100 medical textbooks is a small number. Amedeo Challenge will therefore
The Amedeo Awards will be funded by donations and exclusive sponsorships. Donations will rely on the individuals who were satisfied with our previous textbooks (HIV Medicine, Influenza Report) or other web services (see the complete list at Flying Publisher); and even more so, on the long-time subscribers to Amedeo who now total over 400,000 Subscription-Years (see Table 1) and have received more than 40,000,000 literature newsletters. 
Exclusive sponsorships might be interesting both for pharmaceutical and other companies, as well as for individual persons. 7. A public vote will be able to determine the best textbooks. If more than one textbook is submitted before the deadline, there will be a vote to determine the winner (see Rules and Conditions, #7). One week after the deadline, and for 30 days thereafter, all subscribers to Amedeo topics related to the subject of the textbook will be invited to participate in a poll to designate the best textbook. The winning team will receive 80 % of the award. If there is a second and a third team, they will receive the remaining 16 % and 4 % of the award, respectively. In the past, we have achieved reproducible results with polls organised among subscribers to the Amedeo Literature Service. Of interest, among the best medical websites voted by the Amedeo Community at the GoldenLinks4Doctors, the first 7 websites have almost always been the same (PubMed, Amedeo, New England Journal of Medicine, PubMed Central, Medscape, Free Medical Journals, British Medical Journal) although the participants of the poll changed from month to month and from quarter to quarter (> 95 % variation). 8. Winner of Textbook Awards will write additional textbooks or stimulate their colleagues to do so. Once physicians have learnt the basics of producing a medical textbook, they are likely to write subsequent textbooks or to stimulate other colleagues to do so. The Amedeo Textbook Awards are therefore expected to create a new dynamism among writing physicians. 9. Textbook Awards will generate an extraordinary return on investment. The advantages of free medical textbooks are obvious: more people will read more medical textbooks. High-quality medical information will contribute to improved medical care. For those who make donations, the return of investment is equally advantageous. If we invest 12,500 Euro to produce a free medical textbook and if the corresponding PDF is downloaded 100,000 times, every PDF comes at a cost of 0.12 Euro. A donation of 10 Euro will therefore generate 80 downloaded PDF medical textbooks. In addition, people who make donations will one day find textbooks that are useful for themselves and that they otherwise would never have found. Exclusive sponsors have the following visibility:
10. Free Medical Textbooks will be available soon on a great number of topics. Free Medical Textbooks will soon be available on numerous topics. High-quality and constantly updated medical information will contribute to the improvement of medical care. Every effort should be undertaken to put the Amedeo Textbook Awards in place as soon as possible.
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