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Abstract

This year the Memórias is celebrating 90 years of continuous publication. For any academic journal this would be quite an achievement. However, considering that during this entire period, the journal has been printed, published and distributed from Brazil, distant from the main centers of academic publishing and where the half-life of scientific journals is very low, this is a remarkable accomplishment.During this period the Memórias has managed to maintain a high quality and is regurlarly covered by the leading abstracting services. It is currently among the most highly cited journals in the area of Tropical Medicine (5th) and among Latin American journals (2nd) in all areas of science (797 total citations according to Journal Citation Reports for 1997 by ISI). In 1998 the Memórias published a record number of articles in its regular issues together with articles and abstracts in its supplements. Manuscripts were received from 27 different countries last year.Despite its tradition and age the Memórias has been a pioneer in on line journal publishing in the developing world. The journal maintains an innovative site on the World Wide Web where the full contents of the journal can be consulted and downloaded at no cost. The site also contains a great deal of further information regarding the journal and parallel activities. To mark the 90th anniversary, a number of changes in policy and procedures are being introduced to the journal.Among these are an additional website for the journal. This site has been developed in conjunction with SciELO (The Scientific Electronic Library Online). SciELO is an electronic virtual library covering a selected collection of Brazilian scientific journals. The library is an integral part of a project being developed by Fapesp (The State of São Paulo research funding agency), in partnership with Bireme (the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information). The Fapesp-Bireme Project envisages the development of a common methodology for the preparation, storage, dissemination and evaluation of scientific literature in electronic format.The address of the new website is http://www.scielo.br/memorias. The site offers an alternative to those users who may have difficulty in accessing the Memórias home page at http://www.pobox.br/ memorias or the Memórias site at Bioline Publications http://bioline.bdt.org.br/oc. All sites carry the full text and illustrations of recent issues of the Memórias. Through SciELO the Memórias is now linked with the PubMed, initiative of the National Library of Medicine. This means that users retrieving via Medline an abstract of an article from a recent issue of the Memórias can access the full text either on line in HTML format or download the article in PDF format by clicking on the "go to publisher site" icon above the abstract. We anticipate that this feature together with the fact that there is no charge for accessing the full text will bring greater visibility to articles published in the Memórias.A change is also being made to the pres...