Preprint Déjà Vu | The EMBO Journal

"Twenty‐five years ago, in August 1991, I spent a couple of afternoons at Los Alamos National Laboratory writing some simple software that enabled a small group of physicists to share drafts of their articles via automated email transactions with a central repository. Within a few years, the site migrated to the nascent WorldWideWeb as arXiv.org, and experienced both expansion in coverage and heavy growth in usage that continues to this day. In 1998, I gave a talk to a group of biologists—including David Lipman, Pat Brown, and Michael Eisen—at a meeting at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory (CSHL) to describe the sharing of articles “pre‐publication” by physicists. The talk was met with some enthusiasm and prompted the “e‐biomed” proposal in the following spring by then NIH director Harold Varmus. He encouraged the creation of an NIH‐run electronic archive for all biomedical research articles, including both a preprint server and an archive of published peer‐reviewed articles, which generated significant discussion....

I expressed concern that, from the physicists’ point of view, “the biologists frequently seem an exceedingly timid group, having ceded direct control over their research results to parties not always acting in their interests”.

The “e‐biomed” proposal soon morphed into what we now know as PubMedCentral (PMC). Other participants from the CSHL meeting went on to create the Public Library of Science (PLoS). While neither ultimately had a preprint component, both have been playing a leading role in the open access movement. ..."