Abstract:
Largely unknown only a decade ago, the Internet has now become totally indispensable to biomedical practice and research as a means of information dissemination and retrieval. Electronic mail, list servers and newsgroups make personal, targeted and broadcasted communication around the globe possible. Hundreds of millions of World Wide Web pages, organised by hierarchically structured web directories and dissected by general web indexes, give access to an unprecedented amount of information. More and more scientists find their way to factual and bibliographical databases using the Internet. In addition to some of the more relevant resources for the tropical medicine and international health community, this paper pays special attention to recent and upcoming changes in formal biomedical information transfer. An interesting issue is the future role and position of the published article - either in electronic editions of traditional peer reviewed journals, or in even more revolutionary formats, such as electronic preprint servers - and the implications for authors, reviewers, editors, publishers, and ultimately the readers.
