I thought this was an ironic state of affairs (and a good example of world-class "bogosity" revealed)

http://www.clarionledger.com/apps/pbcs.dll/article?AID=/20040813/OPINION/408130314/1009

UM's online ethics journal not the first

I read Marquita Brown's story ("Online journal focuses on medical ethics issues before they arise," July 12) about the creation of "the first for the nation" online journal of health ethics, the Online Journal of Health Ethics.

The same journal is more boldly described in a Web page of the University of Mississippi as the "nation's first online ethics journal."

If Ms. Brown had only typed the word "bioethics" into a search engine, she would have learned that there is already a major online journal of health care ethics, The American Journal of Bioethics (www.bioethics.net).

In addition to being the first online journal of health ethics in the nation and world, AJOB is also the most widely circulating online health ethics journal. Started in 2000 by myself and the MIT press, edited at Penn and Stanford, and recently sold to the largest science publisher in the world, AJOB has become one of the most lauded journals of this decade.

I am hopeful that the University of Mississippi's new journal, the fourth online journal of bioethics and the ninth online journal of ethics, will find distinction. However, it will not come on the day that the journal launches.

Glenn McGee
Editor in chief
The American Journal of Bioethics
Department of Medical Ethics
University of Pennsylvania
Philadelphia, Pa.