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BMJ No 7093 Volume 314 Editorial Saturday 24 May 1997
Meet Minerva in cyberspaceThe BMJ's web site celebrates its second birthdayMinerva is the BMJ's best loved section. Unsurprisingly, it is also the section that visitors most want to read on our internet web site. To mark the site's second birthday we have decided to grant them their wish. From this week Minerva will be available, in her entirety, at www.bmj.com.Over the past two years we have moved from our original policy of posting only limited material from each week's journal. First, we added all the jobs that are advertised in our classified supplements. Next, we began bundling together full text articles on similar topics. Our first foray was a collection of all the papers relating to bovine spongiform encephalopathy and the new variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease that had appeared in the BMJ since 1988. Full archives of articles that have appeared in our monthly section Information in Practice are available from our web site, as are all the articles from Career Focus in our classified advertisement supplement. The catalogue of With Head & Heart & Hand, Nick Sinclair's photographs of 20th century British doctors,(1) can be viewed by readers unable to visit London's National Portrait Gallery. The mix seems to be working - each week the web site receives about 10,000 visitors from 90 countries, twice as many as a year ago. Two years ago we were one of only 110,000 web addresses competing for visitors' attention. The total has grown 10-fold since then, at a rate of one new web site every minute over the past year (internet domain survey, www.nw.com). Among the new arrivals are web sites devoted to the BMJ Publishing Group (www.bmjpg.com), each of the group's 25 specialist journals, and the BMA (www.bma.co.uk). The pace of technological innovation, however, is outstripping even the increases in traffic and destinations. People now talk of internet years rather like dog years, with each year in cyberspace equalling seven years elsewhere. An indication of where things are heading is evident from our web site. As well as full text Minerva and a modest redesign, visitors this week will find an advertisement for a technology partner. We are looking for a company to help us exploit the new features that have become available to electronic publishers. The advertisement appears only on our web site, and we expect that most negotiations will be conducted entirely electronically. By the end of this year we hope that the full text of Minerva will be joined on our web site by the full text of the entire current issue. This will be supplemented by an easily searchable archive containing the past 10 years of journals. Readers will be able to print out articles that look exactly as they do on the journal page. References in papers will be linked directly to their Medline abstracts. Readers will have the chance to comment on each article, and their email responses will be listed after the relevant article almost as soon as they are submitted. This will circumvent the problem of limited space for letters in the paper journal, which results in our publishing fewer than a third of submitted letters, and those usually two or three months late. The BMJ was the world's first general medical journal to have a substantial presence on the internet. Two years on we remain convinced that this new medium will play an important part in our future and that our readers deserve the best that the medium has to offer. Enjoy Minerva. Tony Delamothe
BMJ, References 1 Sinclair N. With head & heart & hand London: BMJ Publishing, 1997.
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