PubMed Central began as
E-biomed, initially proposed in May 1999 by then-
NIH director Harold Varmus. The idea came to him "abruptly" in December 1998, inspired by the early use of
arXiv for
preprints after a presentation from Pat Brown of
Stanford and
David Lipman, director of
NCBI: The goal of E-biomed was to provide free access to all biomedical research. Papers submitted to E-biomed could take one of two routes: either immediately published as a preprint, or through a traditional
peer review process. The peer review process was to resemble contemporary
overlay journals, with an external editorial board retaining control over the process of reviewing, curating, and listing papers which would otherwise be freely accessible on the central E-biomed server. Varmus intended to realize the new possibilities presented by communicating scientific results digitally, imagining continuous conversation about published work, versioned documents, and enriched "layered" formats allowing for multiple levels of detail. Major commercial publishers had begun experimenting with an indexing system for scientific papers shared across publishers as early as 1993, and were spurred to action following the E-biomed proposal. At the October 1999
STM Annual Frankfurt Conference, several publishers led by
Springer-Verlag reached a hurried conference room consensus to launch their competitor prototype: At the Board meeting of the STM association, held the afternoon of Monday, October 11, before the fair's Wednesday opening, discussion focused on an emerging U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) initiative called E-Biomed (later PubMed Central) that had been proposed by Harold Varmus of the National Institutes of Health in the spring of 1999. Varmus envisioned a digital archive of journals, accessible free of charge and with the added value of reference linking. "Our consensus was that publishers should be the ones doing the linking," said Bob Campbell, who chaired the meeting. "Since we were 'higher up the stream,' so to speak, we should be able to link our articles ahead of the NLM as part of the process of producing them. Stefan von Holtzbrinck then set the ball rolling by offering to link Nature publications with anyone else's. We decided to issue an announcement of a broad STM reference linking initiative. It was, of course, a strategic move only, since we had neither plan nor prototype." A small group led by Arnoud de Kemp of Springer-Verlag met in an adjacent room immediately following the Board meeting to draft the announcement, which was distributed to all attendees of the STM annual meeting the following day and published in an STM membership publication. [...] The potential benefit of the service that would become CrossRef was immediately apparent. Organizations such as AIP and IOP (Institute of Physics) had begun to link to each other's publications, and the impossibility of replicating such one-off arrangements across the industry was obvious. As Tim Ingoldsby later put it, "All those linking agreements were going to kill us." Under pressure from vigorous lobbying from commercial publishers and scientific societies who feared for lost profits, NIH officials announced a revised PubMed Central proposal in August 1999. PMC would receive submissions from publishers, rather than from authors as in E-biomed. Publications were allowed time-embargoed
paywalls up to one year. PMC would only allow peer-reviewed work — no preprints. The then-unnamed publisher-led linking system shortly thereafter became
CrossRef and the larger
DOI system. Varmus, Brown, and others including
Michael Eisen went on to found the Public Library of Science (
PLoS) in 2001, reaching the conclusion "that if we really want to change the publication of scientific research, we must do the publishing ourselves." ==Adoption==