NewsScan Daily, 7 September 1999
From: "NewsScan" <newsscan@newsscan.com>

NIH GOES AHEAD WITH DIGITAL ARCHIVE PLAN
The National Institutes of Health says it's going ahead with plans to
create an online archive of scholarly papers in the life sciences that
it will make freely available via the Web. The archive will be called
PubMed Central, and will be associated with an existing NIH Web site
that offers free access to Medline, an index of biomedical articles <
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PubMed >. The archive will be divided into
two sections: one posting papers that have undergone the peer review
process, and one accepting "preprints," or other papers that have not
been peer-reviewed, but have been approved by a scholarly society or
other gatekeeper. PubMed Central is slated to open in
January. (Chronicle of Higher Education 10 Sep 99)
http://chronicle.com/

Date: Wed, 21 Jul 1999 09:11:54 -0700
From: "NewsScan" <newsscan@newsscan.com>
Subject: NewsScan Daily,  21 July 1999 ("Above The Fold")

EUROPEANS BACK ALTERNATIVE "E-BIOMED" PLAN
The executive director of the European Molecular Biology Organization
(EMBO) says he does not support a U.S.-based plan to electronically
publish unedited, unreviewed research papers on topics related to
biomedicine.  Frank Gannon, who had advocated the project when it was
first conceived, says he still favors the concept but fears that lack
of peer review could "severely undermine biomolecular research."  He
proposes creating a streamlined process that would use "assessors" to
ensure that the experiments described are "correctly designed, the
data are factually correct, and the conclusions are not exaggerated."
The U.S. plan, as currently envisioned, would accept the work of any
scientist, with screening only to remove obscene or gratuitous
material.  Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of
Health and major backer of the U.S. plan, says he would prefer to
start the project with a "noncontroversial" element - the release of
genetic data files, as originally proposed.  This "would be a healthy
place to start and see how we manage it."  (Science 16 Jul 99)
http://www.sciencemag.org/cgi/content/full/285/5426/315