How will E-biomed avoid accentuating economic or language-based disparities in the access to the research literature?
Some have argued that E-biomed would further limit the access to the scientific literature accorded to those who work under limited economic circumstances or understand only languages other than English. We acknowledge that such disparities currently exist, but we believe that free access to the scientific literature in electronic form has a much greater prospect of reducing the disparities than do other means. In most parts of the world, a computer with Internet connections is much less expensive and much faster than subscriptions to biomedical journals. Moreover, the Internet and its successors are evolving rapidly and becoming increasingly accessible worldwide, but there is no comparable trend towards inexpensive and rapid access to the scientific literature in print form. Finally, it is reasonable to expect that E-biomed can facilitate efforts to reduce language barriers to scientific communication by freely providing reports in an electronic format suitable for automated or tradit
