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The new president of the largest lobby group representing US biomedical researchers last week joined critics of the planned website ‘E-Biomed’.

Kaufman: site will not be free. Credit: FASEB

Intended as a free, unifying site for biomedical literature, ‘E-Biomed’ has been proposed by Harold Varmus, director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH.) But David Kaufman, who took office this month as the president of the Federation of American Societies for Experimental Biology (FASEB), says its financing has not been thought through.

He adds that ‘E-Biomed’ will not be ‘free’, since there will be irreducible production costs including review, editing and layout, even if users don't pay for access.

“They haven't listed a variety of approaches for paying for this,” Kaufman said. “If it were more thoroughly fleshed out, the discussion about it could be engaged with facts, instead of the worst-case scenarios on everybody's mind.”

Varmus intends ‘E-Biomed’ to allow fast access to the entire biomedical literature by anyone with a computer and an Internet connection (see Nature 398, 735; 1999 and Nature 399, 8–9; & 399, 720 1999). He has been dogged by the question of how it would be financed, but said recently that “this very important issue” would need to be thoroughly addressed by a proposed international governing body.

Many decisions on the matter, he wrote on NIH's website, were likely to be left to individual journals and publishers. But one of Varmus's suggestions – authors' fee of $200-$1,000 per article - wouldn't come close to financing the site, says Kaufman, a professor of pathology and laboratory medicine at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill.

Kaufman adds that officials from FASEB, whose 19 member societies publish some 35 journals, have “talked about thousands of thousands as a likely cost” per article to authors if their fees were to entirely underwrite ‘E-Biomed’.

Michele Hogan, the executive director of the American Association of Immunologists, which publishes the Journal of Immunology, estimates that the journal's $60 page charge would increase about five-fold for authors if they became the means by which the system was financed.

Kaufman suggested that ‘E-Biomed’ might be funded completely by NIH, or that time on the system could be metered, with users paying for access according to the time spent.