The real stakes of virtual publishing: The transformation of E‐Biomed into PubMed central

Rob Kling · Lisa B. Spector · Joanna Fortuna

48 citations0/0 files storedJournal of the American Society for Information Science and Technology

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Publishing and Scholarly Communication Library Science and Information Academic Publishing and Open Access

Abstract

Abstract In May 1999, National Institutes of Health (NIH) Director Harold Varmus proposed an electronic repository for biomedical research literature server called “E‐biomed.” E‐biomed reflected the visions of scholarly electronic publishing advocates: It would be fully searchable, be free to readers, and contain full‐text versions of both preprint and postpublication biomedical research articles. However, within 4 months, the E‐biomed proposal was radically transformed: The preprint section was eliminated, delays were instituted between article publication and posting to the archive, and the name was changed to “PubMed Central.” This case study examines the remarkable transformation of the E‐biomed proposal to PubMed Central by analyzing comments about the proposal that were posted to an online E‐biomed forum created by the NIH, and discussions that took place in other face‐to‐face forums where E‐biomed deliberations took place. We find that the transformation of the E‐biomed proposal into PubMed Central was the result of highly visible and highly influential position statements made by scientific societies against the proposal. The literature about scholarly electronic publishing usually emphasizes a binary conflict between (trade) publishers and scholars/scientists. We conclude that: (1) scientific societies and the individual scientists they represent do not always have identical interests in regard to scientific e‐publishing; (2) stakeholder politics and personal interests reign supreme in e‐publishing debates, even in a supposedly status‐free online forum; and (3) multiple communication forums must be considered in examinations of e‐publishing deliberations.

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2000Not just a matter of time: Field differences and the shaping of electronic media in supporting scientific communication 2002A bit more to it: Scholarly Communication Forums as Socio‐Technical Interaction Networks 1994First Steps Towards Electronic Research Communication 1996Scholarly publishing: the electronic frontier 1999Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals 1995Biomolecular Databases 1998Free Internet Access to Traditional Journals 2002Locally Controlled Scholarly Publishing Via the Internet: The Guild Model

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