The commercial publishing houses also provide electronic access to their journals but the price of such access can be steep. However, if your library has a subscription to the print version of a particular journal, you may be able to access the electronic version at no cost. Elsevier, which publishes Biofutur, Biotechnology Advances, Trends in Biotechnology, and other journals of interest to biotechnology has perhaps the best site with access to nearly 1000 journals (http://www.sciencedirect.com). The Springer site (http://link.springer.de/) lets you read journals such as Plant Cell Reports, Theoretical and Applied Genetics, Crop Science, Applied Microbiology & Biotechnology, and Molecular & General Genetics. The Academic Press journals are available at http://www.idealibrary.com/ while the Kluwer site (http://www.wkap.nl) has Plant Molecular Biology, Plant Molecular Biology Reporter, and Molecular Breeding although their Transgenic Research and Euphytica are not yet on the Internet.

Most journals now offer their papers in both HTML and PDF versions. The PDF version lets you print the journal article in exactly the same format as the original print version and requires that your computer has the Adobe Acrobat software, which can be downloaded for free at http://www.adobe.com/prodindex/acrobat/readstep.html. By using a color inkjet printer and glossy paper, one can print scientific papers identical to the original reprints right in your office complete with graphics and half-tone photographs. The HTML format is intended for desktop viewing and offers additional features such as hyperlinks within a title to tables and figures (which could be zoomed up), and to other cited and related papers through the Medline database.

Some very high-impact biotechnology journals from the Nature group (http://www.nature.com/) including Nature Biotechnology (http://biotech.nature.com/) offer TOC, abstracts, and news articles on their sites, but do not yet provide full texts of journal articles on the Internet.