Preprint Déjà Vu

Abstract

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.

Figure 1. Yearly and cumulative submissions to arXiv.org, broken out by major subject areas