The Remarkable Transformation of E-Biomed into PubMed Central
No Thumbnail Available
If you need an accessible version of this item, please email your request to iusw@iu.edu so that they may create one and provide it to you.
Date
2001
Authors
Journal Title
Journal ISSN
Volume Title
Publisher
Rob Kling Center for Social Informatics
Permanent Link
Abstract
In 1999, NIH Director Harold Varmus proposed a national biomedical literature server called “E-Biomed.” E-Biomed reflected the visions of scholarly electronic publishing advocates: it would be fully searchable, free to access, and contain full text versions of both pre-print and post-publication biomedical research articles. However, in less than a year, the E-Biomed proposal was radically transformed, eliminating the pre-print section, instituting delays between article publication and posting to the archive, and changing the name to “PubMed Central.” This article examines the remarkable transformation of the E-Biomed proposal to PubMed Central by analyzing posts to an online E-Biomed discussion forum created by the U.S. governments’ NIH, and other 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 statements made by publishers and scientific societies against the proposal. We conclude that: 1) scientific societies and the individual scientists they represent do not always have identical interests, especially in regards to scientific e-publishing; 2) stakeholder politics and personal interests reign supreme in policy debates, even in a supposedly status-free online discussion forum; 3) multiple communication forums must be considered in examinations of public policy deliberations.
Description
Keywords
social informatics, ArXiv, scholarly publishing, electronic forum
Citation
DOI
Link(s) to data and video for this item
Relation
Rights
Creative Commons license
Type
Working Paper