There was a time when subscribers paid several hundred dollars a year to update Gynecology and Obstetrics, a six-volume loose-leaf series that summed up the standard of knowledge in the field. Sciarra had been editor since the mid-1970s, and corralled contributors around the world to write sections, for sums so small that no one was in it for the money.
The Internet had killed the series by 2004. For the next two years, Sciarra importuned the publisher to give him the copyright so that he could put the material online.
"I wanted to make it available to people in developing countries, and I told the publisher it wouldn't compete with any of their existing books," he says. "Maybe they just got tired of me." Whatever the reason, the publisher finally agreed, and Sciarra passed the copyright to a publisher in England, David Bloomer. He established a charity to underwrite the project as a memorial to his daughter, who had died of breast cancer. GLOWM debuted in November 2008.
On Finding Free Help
I wrote to all the editors and authors we had at the time [from Gynecology and Obstetrics] and said, "We're going to make the material available for free and I want you to contribute your time and effort free, and you'll get an author's page for your bio and picture, and everyone will know that none of us are receiving any compensation." Virtually everyone said they'd do it. Most doctors are interested in educating other doctors and are reasonably altruistic. And physicians have always been exploited by medical publishers.
On Print and the Internet
Our own young docs [at Northwestern] don't buy textbooks. Whenever they want information, they dash over to the computer and pull it up, sometimes from sources that aren't the most reliable. GLOWM can be a great adjunct for doctors who have time constraints or no library resources. One idea we had recently is to make the material compatible with some of the smart phones, so that a doc could type in "postpartum hemorrhage" and get an outline of what to do.
John J. Sciarra, M.D.
Editor-in-Chief, Global Library of Women's Medicine
Professor and Chairman Emeritus, Department of Obstetrics and Gyneco logy, Feinberg
* School of Medicine of Northwestern University, Chicago
* Editor of the International Journal of Obstetrics and Gynecology, 1985-2006
* Former president, International Federation of Gynecology and Obstetrics
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