Re: Medical journals are dead. Long live medical journals

From: Steve Hitchcock <sh94r_at_ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Date: Tue, 29 Feb 2000 15:22:46 +0000

At 08:23 AM 2/29/00 -0500, Albert Henderson wrote:
>Actually, the National Institutes of Health sponsored preprint
>distribution in the 1960s, much like one in high energy physics
>funded by the Atomic Energy Commission and run by the American
>Institute of Physics. As described above, it involved paper
>copies sent by mail and was not available to the general public.
>The "Information Exchange Groups" (IEG) experiment went down in
>flames amidst complaints about the deteriorating quality of its
>content. See P H Abelson (SCIENCE 1966;154:727) or E A Confrey
>(SCIENCE 1966;154:843) for some details.

Or see Green, Death of an experiment, International Science and Technology,
May 1967, 82-88.

I can't instantly retrieve the Science articles cited above so I'm
guessing, but I suspect Green has a different point of view.

"The editors of five biomedical journals met and agreed to refuse
publication of any manuscript previously circulated via IEG. This
unaccountable decision turned out to be lethal to the IEG."


Steve Hitchcock
Open Citation (OpCit) Project,
Multimedia Research Group, Department of Electronics and Computer Science
University of Southampton SO17 1BJ, UK
Email: sh94r_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk
Tel: +44 (0)23 8059 3256 Fax: +44 (0)23 8059 2865
Received on Mon Jan 24 2000 - 19:17:43 GMT