EDITORIAL

EJB ELECTRONIC JOURNAL OF BIOTECHNOLOGY

....MOVING FROM SCIENCE TO DEVELOPMENT...

The Universidad Católica de Valparaiso and CONICYT, the National Council for Scientific and Technological Research of Chile have the pleasure to welcome the global scientific and academic community to EJB Electronic Journal of Biotechnology, a new international scientific journal edited exclusively in electronic format.

Electronic Journal of Biotechnology is addressed to cope with the needs of scientists, academics and students covering comprehensively all aspects of biotechnology through research papers and invited review articles. Its goal is to be considered among those journals which publishes the most significant scientific literature and, moreover, to conform an interactive site to deliver relevant information in the different areas of biotechnology.

The worldwide web offers a unique opportunity to spread out scientific knowledge, providing an efficient and high quality transfer media. The powerful tools that bioinformatics offer allow to overcome the deficiencies and limitations of conventional printed information.

The main advantage of the electronic format is the highly dynamic and interactive way in which the scientific information is transferred, using hypertext and linking descriptors, references and authors, three dimensional images, movement and sound. The electronic environment is beginning to reveal its potential for enhancing the development of scientific knowledge, favoring its integration and projection to define new scientific problems. Other inherent advantage is the considerable time reduction in publishing and distribution of the journal. Moreover, papers in electronic format are not only presented in HTML but also in PDF format fulfilling the appropriate use of international standards.

Visibility is another comparative advantage, as it emerges as a factor of great importance in order to gain access to the international scientific community, considering that the number of relevant journals has more than doubled in the past few years. Electronic Journal of Biotechnology has two server locations, one in the southern hemisphere at http://www.ejbiotechnology.cl and the other located in U.S.A. at http://www.ejbiotechnology.info, offering an efficient access to the information, independently of the reader geographical location.

Journals must be visible to researchers, teachers, students and industry people, since they play a crucial role for the advancement of science and technology. From this point of view, visibility must be strictly correlated with high strict peer reviewing and selection of papers, as a garantee of the scientific quality of the journal.

Highly qualified members in the different areas of biotechnology constitute EJB Electronic Journal of Biotechnology International Editorial Board, who have kindly accepted our invitation to qualify and supervise its content.

During this year, EJB Electronic Journal of Biotechnology has invited distinguished members from its Editorial Board to contribute with review articles. In the near future our effort will be focused to increase the publication of high quality research papers, while maintaining a reduced number of invited review articles.

We kindly invite the biotechnology community to send their research manuscripts to Electronic Journal of Biotechnology and to make use of the web site as a meeting place for biotechnology. We are confident that publishing in EJB Electronic Journal of Biotechnology will be a rewarding experience.

April 1998, Valparaíso - Chile