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The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO) may join the initiative of the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) to launch a global website to centralize much of the biomedical literature and make it freely accessible. EMBO executive director Frank Gannon met NIH director Harold Varmus recently for talks.

The meeting may be the first step in the internationalization of the ‘E-Biomed’ project (see Nature 398, 735;1999). The EMBO council is now considering the possibility of joining the NIH in an interim governing board and offering its peer-review services.

Some observers predict that, if such a board can attract the major stakeholders, it would be sufficient to get the initiative under way. That would avoid the need for an international consultation that might see the project derailed by publishers and professional societies with interests in maintaining the current print journals system.

Separate plans to establish a preprint server in biomedicine are already being discussed by the British Medical Journal and HighWire Press, a not-for-profit outfit set up in 1995 by Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources to help universities and societies publish on the web at low cost.

“I think we are going to go forward anyway [despite ‘E-Biomed’] on the grounds that a thousand flowers may bloom,” says Michael Keller, head of HighWire Press. “At some point there will be a collapse into one or several servers,” he predicts.

Richard Horton, editor of The Lancet medical journal, says that he is in principle ready to support Varmus's proposal. “I find ‘E-Biomed’ a very welcome stimulus for debate. I'm delighted to see it,” says Horton. His vision is of the bulk of the primary literature being freely accessible, with only the top journals surviving as commercial enterprises.

But Horton is concerned that the proposed global database may accentuate the Anglo-Saxon domination of publishing, and result in discrimination against scientists from non-English-speaking, and developing, countries.

Vitek Tracz, chief executive officer of the Current Science group, says his company will also launch a preprint server (with optional peer review) this summer. The company has decided to offer all primary papers in medicine and biology free online, and to reap profits from review journals. Tracz is a keen supporter of ‘E-Biomed’, and is discussing how his company could participate.