he
information superhighway has done much lately to divert traffic away from the campus
library. Many scientists and students visit the virtual library right on their desktops to
read scientific papers in their favorite journals. Whether you are in Topeka or Tbilisi,
browsing through a new scientific paper in the magazine Science is just a few mouse clicks
away! Most publishers are racing to place their journals on the Internet where one can not
only read complete scientific articles but also jump to cited papers in the title, connect
to the nucleic acid or protein databases, and even e-mail the authors instantly. The
awesome power of the Internet thus goes beyond providing simple electronic access of
published text to pack more punch in journal reading.
Here I list a few Internet sites to retrieve full texts of scientific articles in
biotechnology from the peer-reviewed print journals. Almost all sites require a fee for
such access although most let you browse their table of contents (TOC), abstracts and some
general articles for free. A few journals have free trial periods while many publishers
provide free "TOC alert" whereby the titles from your favorite journals are
emailed to you periodically.
A comprehensive listing of many molecular biology journals online can be found at the
"Cell and Molecular biology Online" site (http://www.cellbio.com/elecpubs.html) and
at "Biochemistry and Molecular Biology Journals" (http://www.geocities.com/~jrbeasley/biochem/journals.html).
The most innovative and thoughtful effort in placing scientific journals on the
Internet is from Stanford University, called HighWire Press (http://highwire.stanford.edu/). To reduce
exploding journal costs and to make use of the communication opportunity provided by the
Internet, HighWire has teamed up with many non-profit journal publishers such as
scientific societies and universities to provide electronic access to journals such as:
Science (http://www.sciencemag.org/)
PNAS (http://www.pnas.org/)
Cell (http://www.cell.com/)
Genetics (http://www.genetics.org/)
The EMBO Journal (http://www.emboj.org/)
The Plant Cell (http://www.plantcell.org/)
Plant Physiology (http://www.plantphysiol.org/)
