Electronic publishing is here to stay. It has already made a big impact on the way journals are put out to their readers, with all the big journals now available on line as well as in paper versions. But this is just the start. Improvements in the readability and portability of electronic material are taking place incredibly fast, so that in five years paper journals may not exist at all. People will do their literature searches through their mobile telephones, making use of PubMed or something similar, and read their journals, those that still exist, on fold-over screens or electronic paper. So change is being forced on journals if they want to survive.

This offers great opportunities for medical and scientific publishing. At Occupational and Environmental Medicine we are moving forward with enthusiasm into this new era. As a first step, OEM now has a full text web site that goes live in April 2000. We have had a web site for some time but …