In a 'forgotten experiment,' biologists almost launched the preprint revolution—5 decades ago | Science | AAAS

lterrat's bookmarks 2017-08-24

Summary:

"As a growing number of biologists formally share their papers in online repositories before any peer review or journal publication, it’s often said that they are catching up with physicists, who have posted preprints in the online arXiv server since 1991. But biomedical scientists were actually first, reveals a researcher who has traced the 'forgotten experiment' in which the National Institutes of Health (NIH) created a preprint exchange in the 1960s that publishers ultimately forced to close.

Matthew Cobb, a biologist and science historian at the University of Manchester in the United Kingdom, was browsing letters exchanged by biologists Francis Crick and Sydney Brenner in the archives of Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) in New York when he came across a mention of the NIH project. I 'pulled on the thread,' he tells Science Insider, and learned that starting in 1961, a 70-year-old NIH administrator named Errett Albritton formed what he called Information Exchange Groups (IEGs), consisting of interested scientists working in the same subfield."

Link:

http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2017/08/biologists-forgotten-experiment-started-preprint-revolution-5-decades-ago

From feeds:

Open Access Tracking Project (OATP) » lterrat's bookmarks

Tags:

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Date tagged:

08/24/2017, 19:34

Date published:

08/24/2017, 15:34