Preprint Deja Vu

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 "prepublication" 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.