Washington

A centralized database of scientific literature for biology researchers is to be launched in January by the National Institutes of Health (NIH). It will contain the content of many established journals as well as material that has not yet been peer-reviewed.

The repository is the latest manifestation of the E-Biomed electronic publishing proposal, introduced by NIH director Harold Varmus in April (See Nature 399, 8; 1999). Known as PubMed Central, it will be integrated with PubMed, the National Library of Medicine's existing literature database.

It will include reports that have been screened by what the NIH calls “responsible groups” but not formally peer-reviewed. “This material will be clearly distinguishable from the peer-reviewed content of PubMed Central,” the proposal says. It is intended as the initial site in a system to be overseen by an international advisory committee.

After an outcry from scientific publishers, the proposal makes clear that the NIH itself will not arrange either for peer review of papers in PubMed Central, or for screening of the non-peer-reviewed section.

Most of the peer-reviewed section of the repository is expected to come from existing scientific journals, whose publishers may make their content available after a short lag time: one scientific society says it may delay the appearance of papers from its journals on PubMed Central by about six months.

Scientists will be able to submit material directly to PubMed Central, if they form themselves into what the proposal calls “any organisation with at least three members who are principal investigators on research grants from major funding agencies”.

The new proposal was released on 30 August, when neither Varmus nor David Lipman, head of NIH's National Centre for Biotechnology Information and a key author of the proposal, were available to discuss it. Several of the most strident critics of past E-Biomed proposals were on vacation.

However, Dale Benos, chair of physiology and biophysics at the University of Alabama and head of the publications committee of the American Physiology Society, predicts that the proposal will be welcomed by societies that were initially wary.

“Varmus should be congratulated — he has listened to criticism and reformulated it in a sensible way,” says Benos. “There is not going to be an E-Biomed board of editors, it will let individual journals maintain their autonomy, and things will work much as they do now.”