BJO Online: has the future just happened?

Is the internet over? Lately, we've been deluged on a daily basis with bad news on the internet front, with much collective anguish over the dot.com die-off and the tech stock collapse. The exuberance of the past few years for all things online has been replaced seemingly overnight by pervasive pessimism. The bubble has burst, and burst resoundingly.

So what can all this mean for scientific publishing on the web and forBJO Online in particular? Is the bankruptcy of, say, the online dog food retailer Pets.com a sign that the internet apocalypse is near? Will the electronic medical journal go the way of all start-ups?

We're inclined, here at the eBJO, to believe otherwise. At the same time that the internet consumer business model is disintegrating, overall web traffic continues robust growth. As the economy retreats to bricks and mortar, the audience for online news and information sites is expanding. As a conduit for the dissemination of medical information, the internet is inexorably strengthened by faster internet connections, more extensive web infrastructure, and gigahertz PC power. With dogged optimism, theBJO's online incarnation continues to move forward in a number of ways.

For example, website visitors will by now have noticed that we've renovated our cyberspace. Webmaster Dominic Mitchell and the specialist journals website group have recently redesignedBJO Online for enhanced usability and features, to say nothing of its jaunty new …