The prehistory of biology preprints: a forgotten experiment from the 1960s
School of Biological Sciences, University of Manchester, Manchester, United Kingdom
- Published
- Accepted
- Subject Areas
- Biochemistry, Science Policy
- Keywords
- Preprints, history, science publishing
- Copyright
- © 2017 Cobb
- Licence
- This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, reproduction and adaptation in any medium and for any purpose provided that it is properly attributed. For attribution, the original author(s), title, publication source (PeerJ Preprints) and either DOI or URL of the article must be cited.
- Cite this article
- 2017. The prehistory of biology preprints: a forgotten experiment from the 1960s. PeerJ Preprints 5:e3174v1 https://doi.org/10.7287/peerj.preprints.3174v1
Abstract
In 1961, the NIH began to circulate biological preprints in a forgotten experiment called the Information Exchange Groups (IEGs). This system eventually attracted over 3600 participants and saw the production of over 2,500 different documents, but by 1967 it was effectively shut down by journal publishers’ refusal to accept articles that had been circulated as preprints. This article charts the rise and fall of the IEGs and explores the parallels with the 1990s and the biomedical preprint movement of today.
Author Comment
This article has been submitted as an Essay to PLoS Biology - hence the reference formatting. It would seem odd, given the content, if it were not submitted as a preprint.
