Web pages are accessible in most research and technical labs today, and Internet availability continues to spread rapidly. It would be possible for everyone who wished to contribute a method simply to publish it on a Web server somewhere and then notify a central index site where links to the pages would be stored. This would have several drawbacks. No two methods would be presented in the same way, so the manual would be cumbersome to use. Access speeds would be patchy, pages stored at nearby sites would be retrieved quickly, those from another continent might be very slow.
Many microscopists have access to e-mail and a Web browser, even if it's only Lynx.
A better approach would be for authors to abide by agreed conventions of layout and content, submitting methods to a central site for editing and release. This site should then be mirrored wherever necessary to provide good access speeds to all users. Anyone with e-mail could contribute. The editor would provide a contents list and index by which methods pages could be found. Relative links would be used throughout so that the entire manual would be easy to mirror, the copyright provision would expressly allow this.