While the National Institutes of Health (NIH) moves ahead with plans to create a free database of biological publications, a group of research librarians and information experts is trying to concoct something more far-reaching. The leaders—who are following the model of the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) physics archive—met last week in Santa Fe, New Mexico, to begin working out the framework for a “universal preprint archive” that would include papers from all disciplines. By November, according to spokesperson Herbert Van de Sompel of the University of Ghent in Belgium, the group hopes to release a set of indexing protocols that would permit authors to deposit their work at participating sites and readers to retrieve the full text at no cost.
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Eliot Marshall (1999) studied this question.