Biomedical publishing and the Internet: Evolution or revolution?

The Internet is challenging traditional publishing patterns. In the biomedi cal domain, medical journals are providing more and more content online, bo th free and for a fee. Beyond this, however, a number of commentators belie ve that traditional notions of copyright and intellectual property ownershi p are no longer suited to the information age and that ownership of copyrig ht to research reports should be and will be wrested from publishers and re turned to authors. In this paper, it is argued that, although the Internet will indeed profoundly affect the distribution of biomedical research resul ts, the biomedical publishing industry is too intertwined with the research establishment and too powerful to fall prey to such a copyright revolution .