Washington

The Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) will appear on PubMed Central, the US National Institutes of Health's (NIH) new research archive, one month after the publication of the journal. But the academy's governing council will only allow this if research that has not been peer reviewed is kept off the repository.

Nick Cozzarelli, the editor of PNAS, says that the journal will be available on PubMed Central in January for a trial period of a year. He says that subscribers will have electronic access to papers two weeks before publication — six weeks before they become freely available to everyone else.

But the council of the National Academy of Sciences (NAS) said in a statement that “participation in PubMed Central is contingent upon its not including reports that have been screened but not formally peer reviewed”. The statement went on to say that non-peer-reviewed material, which the NIH has said could be submitted by any group of three grant-supported researchers, would have to be “completely separate” from peer-reviewed material submitted by journals.

“The council felt that making non-peer-reviewed as well as peer-reviewed material available will confuse both scientists and the public,” says Ken Fulton, the executive director of the academy. He adds that the degree of separation “remained to be discussed,” and that “we haven't had the chance to talk to NIH about what this means”.

But some officials at PNAS and the NIH are playing down the condition's significance, saying that PubMed Central will consist entirely of peer-reviewed material when it launches in January. David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH and one of the main architects of PubMed Central, says that, although “we want to keep open the possibility” of publishing material prior to peer review, “all of our work is going into the peer-reviewed side” in the run up to the launch. “The non-peer-reviewed side is just not where the interest is.”

Lipman said that the NAS statement was “completely consistent with our plans” and that any unreviewed material would appear under a different name, “such as PubMed Unreviewed”.

PNAS, a general-interest, biweekly journal with an international circulation of 10,000 and an emphasis on molecular biology, is the second major journal to join PubMed Central. Molecular Biology of the Cell, the journal of the American Society of Cell Biology, will also participate, as will half a dozen smaller journals.

Some geneticists, such as Pat Brown of Stanford University in California, advocate a preprint server for the life sciences community, analogous to the one that Paul Ginsparg runs for physicists at the Los Alamos National Laboratory in New Mexico.

But biologists are unaccustomed to the idea of wide circulation of preprints, and worry about the proliferation of junk medical science on such a server. The NAS council also said that it would form a committee “to consider the consequences of PubMed Central on science and science publishing”.