Plant Biology in the Post-Gutenberg Era (Everything You Wanted to Know and More on the World Wide Web)

Once upon a time, not very long ago, students of biology with burning questions about the nature of life used to spend long hours in dusty library stacks searching for knowledge and opinions recorded by their academic ancestors onto random access information retrieval devices made of matted cellulose fibers. Although these books, as they were called, can still be found in antique stores and some university libraries, their use has declined dramatically since the release of the first user-friendly free World Wide Web (WWW) browser in November of 1993. Publishers were quick to spot the trend and several journals, notably the massive Journal of Biological Chemistry (http: // www-jbc.stanford.edu/), are now available on-line and several others, such as Plant Physiology, are partially available on-line (for a list of electronic journals, see http:// www.nih.gov/science/journals/). It now seems likely that most academic journals will be available via the WWW before the turn of the century, and it seems certain that an ever-increasing number will only be available via the WWW as users and libraries come to grips with using the electronic format. Although most academics have been selected on the basis of a fondness for paper, an expanding coterie have recognized that there are many advantages to the electronic versions. For instance, it is possible to do a full text keyword search of articles in Journal of Biological Chemistry. It is also possible to do forward literature searches. That is, if you are reading an article from a 1995 issue that is cited in a 1996 paper, the 1995 article is annotated with a hypertext link (a highlighted word or phrase that activates a retrieve command when clicked with a mouse) that allows you to move forward to the citing article with the click of a mouse button. Another nice feature is that there need be no limitation on the number of color pictures or film clips associated with an article. role of video in cell biology research is expanding rapidly and there is every reason to expect that it will soon be routinely included in electronic research publications. It is also possible to append commentaries to articles at any time after they appear. In the physics journals, where electronic publishing has been routine for many years, the value of an article is established by the number of annotations by readers who can append their comments to an article. Finally, of course, it is possible to connect the journal articles directly to databases via hypertext links so that one can move from the authors' conclusions back to the original data. kinds of information available in databases or in some other format via the WWW are expanding daily. Indeed, the main problem with the WWW at the moment is that there is so much information available that it is possible to spend many consecutive days busily hopping from one site to another, finding something interesting at each stop but never arriving at the desired source. Thus, in this short overview we have focused on some of the resources that are available without expense and are likely to be of most value to the readers of Plant Physiology. In addition, monthly descriptions of new WWW resources of interest to biologists can be found in The Spider's Web, a regular column in Current Biology.