EDITORIAL - Publishing research on the Internet New responsibilities for electronic journals

In a talk I gave at the 1999 World Conference on Science in Budapest, I argued that the scientific journal will assume heightened importance in the Internet environment, where expanded accessibility to information will produce a pressing need for efficient and reliable means to distinguish between information that is reliable and useful and that which is not. All of us, scientists and citizens, have faced the need to choose among different streams of information. We tend to use personal experience and our training to make such choices. But when the latter are not sufficient, we typically rely on a source that we trust to help us evaluate the value of competing bits of information