Sir

The proposed repository for research reports, PubMed Central1, is rapidly decomposing itself. As I cautioned in Nature2, the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), which developed the proposal, has failed to confront three key issues: funding, lack of expertise, and consensus building. The latest silliness involves an alliance between PubMed Central and the Community of Science, to fund the peer-review function of the repository. This is yet another bleak development in the brief history of this initiative.

NIH director Harold Varmus proposed this project in a particular setting. Workers from many disciplines, including library and information sciences, computer science, clinical medicine, and the biological sciences, had been struggling for several years to develop the tools and procedures needed to produce an online archive of bioscience research reports. When Varmus and the NIH were initially confronted with an avalanche of negative comments, they quickly attempted to revise the proposal. But each succeeding incarnation of the PubMed Central scheme was ever more insipid. Let us remember the philosophy and purpose that have driven this idea in the larger communities of research, information and science: free, unfettered, global access to a permanent, online archive of research reports in the biological and medical sciences.

For-profit publishers have already created many commercial models that are attempting to mimic such a repository, with generally poor results. The typical electronic model is worse than the traditional paper journal. It is more difficult to navigate, resides behind cost barriers that exclude vast numbers of researchers, and conforms to no archival standards. Varmus and the NIH have done nothing to improve this. In fact, the PubMed Central initiative has been a distraction from the concrete steps that are required to ensure funding, access and continuity for such a repository. Canada has put thought, time and funding behind a brilliant national initiative to create what PubMed Central might become.

Last month, a meeting was held in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to discuss and promote the development of standards for what is being called a universal preprint service. This is an important step in the right direction, and draws on the necessary inter-disciplinary expertise. The meeting brought together representatives of the American Physical Society, the Council on Library and Information Resources, the Library of Congress, Los Alamos National Laboratory, and various US and overseas universities, among others. The group plans to include as many perspectives as possible, but it needs support (see http://vole.lanl.gov/ups/ups.htm). This is an opportunity for the NIH to get serious or get out.