Preprint Déjà Vu

• Published in: The EMBO journal Vol. 35; no. 24; pp. 2620 - 2625
• Main Author: Ginsparg, Paul
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Blackwell Publishing Ltd 15-12-2016; Nature Publishing Group UK; John Wiley and Sons Inc
• Subjects: Cold springs; Commentary
• ISSN: 0261-4189; 1460-2075
• DOI: 10.15252/embj.201695531

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.
Graphical Abstract
Preprints allow stable archiving and sharing of research findings with minimal delay, complementing peer‐reviewed journals. In the physical sciences, preprints are an integral part the scientific process. Here, the initiator of the concept describes why and how preprints can work in biology.