ABSTRACT
Scientific, technical and medical research has for many centuries been published in journals, and peer review has become synonymous with this traditional pattern of journal publication. Although it has come under sustained criticism and its shortcomings have been discussed widely, 1 nonetheless peer review continues to be valued by both researchers and practitioners as providing a quality filter for the recording of ongoing research findings:
Peer review is a quality-control and certification filter necessitated by the vast scale of learned research today. Without it, no one would know where to start reading in the welter of new work reported every day, nor what was worth reading, and believing, and trying to build one’s own research upon. 2
Peer review, albeit improved, will survive the electronic age, since few readers, especially those in clinical practice, are clambering for more (and less refined) information. 3
As with databases and databanks, the full text of journals is fast becoming available directly over the Internet. This chapter considers the range of features offered by electronic journals, describes tools that may be used to find electronic journals and individual articles and outlines recent developments in the publication of preprints in biomedicine.
