The advent of gopher and mosaic (especially mosaic) has made it very very easy to publish text that includes graphics on the Internet in a form that many people can access. This is a powerful form of advertising for your work and can reach the scientific community (at least those who are in the 1990s and know about mosaic!) very quickly.
For example, in mid February I made a preprint of a prediction paper available on our ftp server because I was keen for the community to see it before the crystal structure of the protein was solved. Since then, 80 people from around the world have downloaded the preprint. A further advantage of electronic distribution is that you can add extra data/figures that would be too large or complex to include in a printed journal. Although we had the proofs some months ago, the ``official'' printed version of the paper has yet to appear in the library.
In order to make documents available for others to read you first need
to write them in HTML. This is not difficult, the online guide at
York gives a nice introduction, further guides exist at the NCSA where
mosaic was developed. There are tools for some word processors to
help with writing HTML documents. For example, a nice macro exists
for Microsoft Word for Windows, which automatically generates the HTML
file for you. There are also various translators to help convert
existing documents. One will convert a Word .rtf file, though this
does not cope with equations or graphics. If you write in ,
then there is an excellent translator available from Nikos
Drakos of Leeds university. The translator copes well with images and
equations and I've used it to convert preprints of virtually all my
recent publications - see the bibliography on my server. The
latex2html converter also allows the file to be formatted and printed
conventionally in an attractive form. You can see a list of other translators
on the CERN WWW server.
In order that groups in the lab can make their documents available to the world, Richard and Ed have set up an http server on the VMS system. Each group in the LMB will have a directory and one member of the group will have permission to make information available in the directory. In this way, groups that want to advertise their work on the World Wide Web can do so without having to trouble Ed or Richard. Ed has already made some general information about the lab available on the server and included links to many useful services.