JOURNAL OF THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF MEDICINE.

The article offers views on E-biomed, an electronic public library of medicine and other life sciences proposed by Harold Varmus, Director of the U.S. National Institutes of Health. It offers a way to liberate a knowledge system in which information is often hard to extract. However, it failed to address the point-scoring system that has affected journal publication. Varmus does not pursue the idea that articles might be reviewed initially by specialist groups rather than by journal editors.