It's clear there's been a fairly consistent paradigm for scientific publishing since 1665, and its been the paper journal. From 1995 to 2000, something new arrived -the electronic journal. For those of us closely involved in the process - John Sack, Bill Wistcher, Kent Anderson - it's been an exciting and messy and sometimes exhausting time, and what we've ended up with is a new paradigm, that we can call slightly "the traditional online journal."

So I want to situate myself here - on reasonably firm ground. Most of my talk will be concerned with looking back -how did we get from there to here. But I really want to turn around and look ahead too. Between these two we'll cover all the bmj.com’s new initiatives – realised and planned - the advertised title of this talk.

My position is accurately described as editor, bmj.com. The BMJ Publishing Group has websites for another 30 odd specialist journals, books, and other more exotic confections. I don't run those divisions; in some cases they have radically different notions from mine. Lack of consensus is not a problem – one of the 4 aims of our group strategy is to Embrace experimentation."

BMJ centric What you're getting is the view from a general medical journal, not a specialist journal. (JAMA ---NEJM, Lancet)