2004

Andrzej Krauze

If you're one of the hundreds of thousands of regular BioMedNet users, you'll know that the Web site went dark on June 30, after nine years of creating a large and vibrant community of life scientists, based on content such as a bookstore, mouse knockout database, PubMed, and a biomedical database. (If you're a regular reader of The Scientist Daily News online, you'll know that we reported the coming demise in December.) The abridged story of the once wildly successful site is worth repeating at a time when publishers are still grappling with what works and what doesn't on the Web, and because so many scientists and others felt so warmly about BioMedNet's offerings.

Vitek Tracz dreamt up what would eventually become BioMedNet in the early 1990s, before the Internet had really taken off. On a US trip in the very early days of the Web, Tracz decided...