And they said it wouldn't last...

On 9 June 2000, the first edition of Genome Biology appeared, both online and in print. It included a column by yours truly called 'The grail problem' [1]. The second issue, on 28 July, contained a second opinion column by the same author, this one entitled 'Dog eat dogma' [2]; it discussed how genomics was changing the Central Dogma of Biology from 'DNA makes RNA makes protein' to 'Sequence determines structure determines function.' You might have thought that this one-to-one mapping would have frightened most readers off, but that doesn't seem to have happened: almost 120 issues later, both the journal and this column are about to celebrate their 10th anniversary.Genome Biology was the brainchild of many people, and I don't know who all of them were. My own dealings at that time were primarily with Miranda Robertson, Theo Bloom, and Vitek Tracz. Vitek was the founder of the open access publisher BioMed Central, and in the year 2000, open access publishing was regarded by many as a fool's dream and by many others as a threat to their way of life. Vitek, Miranda, and Theo were convinced not only that it was a viable business model, but that it was the wave of the future.And if open access publishing was considered either heretical or ridiculous, the idea of a primarily online scientific journal was considered suicidal. Yet Genome Biology was conceived from the beginning as primarily an online publication; the print edition that went out to subscribers for the first few years was an afterthought and, frankly, looked like one.Content was another potential problem. In January 2000, there were still a relatively small number of complete genome sequences, and nearly all of them were of prokaryotes. The founding editors and publisher of Genome Biology were betting on a revolution that really hadn't started yet in the minds of many people.In retrospect, however, the timing couldn't have been better, because something else happened in June of 2000 besides the launch of this