Publication is the heart of science. The early development of scientific publication in the 1800’s was one of the most significant events in the area of science. For the first time scientists had a set of standards for reporting their results to other scientists, and a means for quality control.
I became interested in this in 1995 when on a Saturday morning I received a message from Tony Villasenor from NASA who asked a simple question of why isn’t biomedical research on the Internet? At this point we started to write an article which has become highly cited, called the Death of Biomedical Research. In this article we outline the initial infrastructure of how the Web could be used for distribution of biomedical research. At the same time I became friends with Tony Delamothe from the BMJ and invited him to our GHNet meetings in Washington. He came, and we went to NASA to see what could be done. As a result he brought the BMJ on the Internet. Since then we have pushed the field arguing that there is few if any technologies in science that are over 150 years old when a powerful technology is available. This has been both an exciting and contentious area as will be presented
