Harold Varmus is still waiting for the revolution. In a 1999 proposal he later described as a “manifesto,” the then director of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) suggested creating an electronic repository to host freely accessible research papers, including manuscripts prior to their formal publication. The next year, a version of Varmus's proposal spawned PubMed Central, a digital archive where all papers stemming from NIH-funded research must be submitted within 12 months of publication. However, the agency never created one key aspect of Varmus' ultimate vision: a preprint portal.
A decade later, the practice of prepublication archiving, now routine in physics, is looking for another chance in the biomedical and life sciences. On 3 April, the journal PeerJ launched a preprint server aimed at life scientists, while Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory Press, the publishing arm of the Long Island, New York–based research institute, is hoping to lure in biologists with its own preprint website later this year. Both are modeled on the wildly successful physical sciences preprint server, arXiv.org, which is gaining a fast following among some quantitative-minded biologists.
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