The number and type of electronic-only publications is growing rapidly - most academic libraries provide a running list. The sites below illustrate key directions in which online scientific, technical and medical communication are evolving.

 “In light of the excellent editorial in the BMJ of December 2006 How Web 2.0 is changing medicine :Is a medical wikipedia the next step? And the interesting rapid response that have arisen from this – take a look at www.JournalReview.org another example of the use of Web tools to enable interactivity and participation - in this case by physicians.”

 Engineering Digital Repositories Landscape Analysis by Macleod and Moffat which reviews the landscape in the area of digital repositories in engineering to help inform the development of a Pilot Engineering Repository search service which does not require authentication because it cross-searches only freely available data or metadata.

 With the upsurge in use of social networking sites such as YouTube, SciVee provides a site for scientists wishing to share (and thus promote) their research through multimedia presentations which can be linked into the content of a published article.

 An interesting case study about the publication of an Open Access journal in Medical Education. The article states “Establishing an electronic journal is a difficult task and I suspect this is why so many of these journals languish and never really get off the ground.” Data on manuscript submissions to the online journals are included as shown below:

 Portico - the latest initiative from the Mellon Foundation. The mission of Portico is “To preserve scholarly literature published in electronic form and to ensure that these materials remain available to future generations of scholars, researchers, and students”. The scale and complexity of the infrastructure and operation necessary to preserve core electronic scholarly literature exceeds that which can be supported by any individual library or institutional budget. Portico is an innovative solution to the challenges of long term preservation of the scholarly literature which is taking a systemwide view of preservation activity.

 Open Access online only Chemistry publishing has come to BioMedCentral.

 How Much Information? - For a report from Hal Varian’s group at Berkeley which confirms that with the world population estimated to be 6.3 billion, almost 800 MB of recorded information is produced per person each year. It would take about 30 feet of books to store the equivalent of 800 MB of information on paper.

 A clear review of the current stages of development of institutional repositories by a former librarian at Georgia Tech.

 Another UK group, PALS, has released a report by Mark Ware on the current state of play on Institutional repositories – with particular emphasis on the UK.

 PubMed Central (PMC) changed its policy in two areas that make it more attractive to publishers to participate. Firstly the strict requirement for publishers to have their full text hosted on the PMC site - as distinct from their own- is now waived and PMC will provide a link to a journal site. Secondly, for those who do deposit their data with PMC, a copy of this data is available on request at no cost, and in parallel a project is well underway to digitize back issues – a solution to long term archiving? The result has been growth in the number of PMC journals from an initial 8 to over 100 by February 2004, and now just over 80 in January 2006. Note that more than 60 of these journals are from one Open Access publisher BioMed Central.

 Foundations and Trends in Communications and Information Theory - Publishers now have announced a series of web-based knowledge environments targeted at the research community in Business & Economics, and Technology.

 Directory of Open Access Journals - for a comprehensive directory of online open access journals.

 http://www.intumed.com/best_resident.htm# - For BeST resident – the first online general surgical training program which covers the training needs of surgery residents and is designed to help surgeons in training find information faster. Developed jointly by Harvard, the Royal College of Surgeons in Ireland and Intuition – an electronic learning company.

 http://www.physionet.org for a new form of publication not possible in print which is a resource for medical education and research across a range of physiological events. The site has a number of excellent features and functions and is included in the new ISI service "Current Web Contents".

 http://www.bioone.org/bioone/?request=index-html for Bio One a not-for-profit venture supported by libraries, scientific societies and academia. Content is focused on biological, environmental and ecological sciences. Bio One is providing a broad range of services including hosting of online content and sales and marketing worldwide. For more information on Bio One see also "Changing the Role of Research Libraries in Scholarly Communication" by Adrian Alexander and Marilu Goodyear http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-03/alexander.html

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