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  It has been 5 years since Stanford University's HighWire Press launched a revolution in scientific publishing with the creation of JBC Online in 1995. Now virtually every life science journal, as well as journals of many other disciplines, publish online. From that beginning with JBC Online in 1995, HighWire now produces online editions of more than 180 of the most highly cited journals and has clearly set the standard for innovative, very high quality Internet publication of the world's most important scientific journals (see the 500 most highly cited journals at http://highwire.stanford.edu/top/journals.dtl).

  During this remarkable 5-year period, HighWire has published more than 600,000 articles, and more than 140,000 articles are available free to anyone with Internet access. This represents, by far, the largest archive of barrier-free, peer-reviewed life science research reports on earth and serves the world research community exceedingly well.

  The publication of JBC Online has also skyrocketed during this 5-year revolution. As of March 12, 2000, we have published 25,874 articles. As a result of our "free back issues" policy to release all articles free at the end of each calendar year, more than 24,694 are available to everyone at no cost. Also during this time, the usage of JBC online has increased enormously. In 1 week in mid-1995, about 1000 individual readers contacted the JBC Online. For the 1 week ending March 2, 2000, more than 41,000 individuals contacted the JBC site.

  On March 8, 2000, JBC and HighWire launched a truly innovative feature called JBC Papers in Press. We now publish papers the hour they are accepted for publication and release them free to anyone with internet access (see www.jbc.org).

  What's next? The HighWire team continues to innovate, and we can expect many exciting new developments in the next 5 years. It is clear that online publication is vastly superior to print publication with easily searchable archives and very productive linking to other related research information. Given this great superiority of online publication, we are rapidly headed toward a drastic transformation of the print journal. Many journals are already making the online version of their research reports the version of record. These changes will redefine our libraries and how scientists access the exponentially increasing volume of research results.

  Congratulations HighWire, for revolutionizing science publication. We can't wait to see what's next.