This summer, many biomedical editors and publishers are wondering how their journals will survive if the government goes ahead with a plan to distribute biomedical papers for free on the Internet. But such qualms do not trouble the plan's author, Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH). He's charging forward with "E-biomed," as he calls it. His idea is to create "free, fast, and full access to the entire biomedical research literature" for anyone with a computer and an Internet connection. E-biomed would distribute unedited preprints, as well as articles that have been through the traditional mill of peer review. Varmus's reason for doing this: Taxpayers have paid for the research already, he says, so NIH should make the results widely available.
Varmus released a written description of E-biomed in April (Science, 30 April, p. 718), and since then he has defended the proposal in public and private venues. His most recent defense came in an "addendum" posted on NIH's Web site on 21 …
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