Chance discovery of forgotten 1960s 'preprint' experiment

In 1961, the National Institutes of Health in the USA set up what were called "Information Exchange Groups" (IEGs); researchers would send in their draft papers or discussion documents, which would then be duplicated and sent out to a list of subscribers. The system eventually involved over 3,600 researchers around the world and saw the production of over 2,500 different documents, on millions of pages of paper.

The experiment was shut down in 1967 following a sustained campaign by academic publishers and learned societies, just as physicists were discussing developing a similar kind of system. The growth in the IEGs and their possible extension into physics had provoked systematic opposition from journal publishers such as Nature and Robert Maxwell's Pergamon Press, as well as learned societies such as the American Association for the Advancement of Science (the publishers of Science magazine).

Vitriolic editorials were published in Science and Nature as a number of journals refused to consider articles that had been circulated as preprints. The publishers claimed that they were able to guarantee the accuracy and probity of scientific findings, and that the widespread adoption of preprints threatened the existence of journals. Many researchers felt that the real issue was the potential threat to publishers' income and prestige.

The widespread circulation of preprints in physics really took off in the 1990s with the appearance of the World Wide Web and a server called arXiv. Biology continued to lag behind, and a further attempt to launch preprints in 1999 met with similar hostility from publishers and learned societies and was soon abandoned. It is only recently that biology preprints have been widely accepted by scientists and by journals.

This story, unknown to all but a few historians of documentation and some old-timer scientists, shows how publishers and academic vested interests have opposed the open circulation of knowledge in the name of money and prestige. It also shows how even old-style technology was able to bypass the traditional gate-keepers of science and the barriers they created.