The original preprint system was scientists sharing photocopies. Then journal publishers screamed
Furious opposition from journals and some leading scientists quashed a long-forgotten effort to distribute preprints of unpublished biology research in the 1960s.
The revolutionaries were too early.
The movement to make biology papers freely available before they have been peer-reviewed, let alone published in a reputable journal, finally succeeded in 2013, when bioRxiv (pronounced bio-archive) was launched by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory. But 50 years before, the National Institutes of Health tried something similar: distributing unpublished scientific papers, or preprints, to a handpicked group of leading researchers.
The effort was intended to speed the dissemination of potentially important advances, but it was met with such hostility from some eminent biologists and journals — one called the papers “shoddy merchandise” — that on Thursday in PLOS Biology.
