The rapid rise in the research field of TSE, as a result of both the epidemic of BSE and the risk of unknown size that has been taken concerning human health, will require that information is available rapidly to researchers throughout the world. The aim of the journal is to carry out this publication in an independent manner and using rigorous scientific review policies. It is important that both much of the research that has not reached the literature for various non-scientific reasons does so because in such an expanding field the newcomers will only be able to start with what is published in order to organise their work. This was felt to be important as many of the pieces of data produced in the TSE field would often be thought of by standard publishers as inadequate or verbose. Publication is daily Abstracts will be on Medline and other computer search systems.
Publication is rapid.
An internet conference system, newsgroup, and website are associated with the journal, allowing criticism of the article to be made quickly and openly. The publishers felt this to be essential in that there is much difficulty in interpretation of data and readers can be thought of as a help in this. This is expected to be unlikely but will be at the discretion of the editor. The time taken to transfer data from one computer to another depends on the standard of the connection and currently there are many servers that can receive at only 2k bits per second or less. Also, the backlog of research data that has not been published for various reasons is known to be large and will give an initially odd appearance to the articles published.