This month Retrovirology publishes the meeting abstracts from the 10 th annual Institute of Human Virology conference held August 29 th to September 2 nd , 2005 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. In this editorial, the rationale for publishing meeting abstracts is discussed.To celebrate the 10 th annual meeting of the Institute of Human Virology (IHV), Retrovirology publishes this month a supplement [1] which includes 315 abstracts of presentations that took place August 29 th to September 2 nd , 2005 in Baltimore, Maryland, USA. This compilation of meeting abstracts, as with all other items published in Retrovirology, will be listed in PubMed, indexed in MedLine, and permanently archived in PubMed Central. The IHV abstracts will be available for all to read in an unrestricted "Open Access" manner. This latter privilege is important because fully two-thirds of the users of free and open data bases such as PubMed are in fact not academics. The users may be patients, students, teachers, or healthcare professionals; and they would be barred from information-access by a fee-based format.Is there value to publishing Meeting Abstracts? On several levels, the answer appears to be "yes". While the IHV abstracts are the first of its kind for Retrovirology, our experience with publishing meeting reports [2][3][4][5] [5], attended by ~125 scientists, was accessed 610 times in the first ten days after its publication. Independently, Scherer et al. [6] found in a study of 2,391 meeting abstracts that 51% of the abstracts later appeared as full articles in journals. In another survey, 84% of journals were found to permit the citation of meeting abstracts in bibliographies [7]. Because on average an entire year lags between the time that a paper/ poster is presented at a meeting and its eventual publication in a journal, publishing meeting abstracts arguably serves to narrow a knowledge gap between those who attended a meeting and those who did not [7]. Moreover, extant data support that the "open access" approach to publishing scientific information promotes a higher rate of citation to the published work [8]. Thus, it stands to reason that there is value for both authors and readers of Retrovirology meeting abstracts.Let me close this writing by telling you a personal anecdote which illustrated for me why archiving of meeting abstracts is important. In the early 1980's, I was a graduate student working in one of three laboratories worldwide which were competing on the cloning and the characterization of the cytomegalovirus (CMV) immediate-early (IE) promoter. This is the same CMV promoter that is res-