Paris

Key role: the European Bioinformatics Institute located at Hinxton Hall in Britain. Credit: HARPER/EBI

The European Molecular Biology Organization (EMBO), upset over US plans to proceed unilaterally with plans for PubMed Central, a free website for life-science papers, is to provide 500,000 euros (US$520,000) in seed money for the creation of E-Biosci, a European counterpart to be launched in the new year.

Discussions on proposals for a global life-sciences repository, led by both the US National Institutes of Health (NIH) and EMBO, shifted sharply during the summer when Harold Varmus, director of the NIH, decided to accelerate matters and push ahead alone with the launch in January 2000 of a US site that would accept both reviewed and unreviewed manuscripts.

PubMed Central, which is estimated to cost $1–3 million each year, already has the backing of the American Society for Cell Biology, and the US National Academy of Sciences is considering whether to take part and on what terms. But some EMBO officials are unhappy at the US decision to create PubMed Central. “We would have preferred the joint launch of a harmonized world system,” says one.

EMBO's planned European operation is not intended to be a competitor to PubMed Central, as this would defeat the purpose of making the literature freely accessible from a single repository. Rather, the EMBO council felt that Europe needs to invest — and quickly — if it is to have a say in the future development of a global repository.

Most of the seed money will go to creating the computing infrastructure at the European Molecular Biology Laboratory, which runs the European Bioinformatics Institute (EBI) in Cambridge, United Kingdom.

But EMBO will seek support from the European Commission, European scientific bodies and the private sector, as its pockets are not as deep as the NIH's, and PubMed Central has a head start in its links to the popular PubMed citation and abstract database, for which Europe has no equivalent.

Varmus visited EMBO this month to discuss ways forward. The US and European systems are expected to exchange material daily, much as happens now between genome databases at the NIH's National Center for Biotechnology Information and those at EBI — scientists accessing the system would be able to search seamlessly across one system.

The main difference between PubMed Central and E-Biosci is likely to be the content. In both systems, most of the peer-reviewed content is expected to come from existing journals, but they will differ significantly in the manner in which non-peer-reviewed material would be accepted.

PubMed Central would allow submissions from “any organization with at least three members who are principal investigators on research grants from major funding agencies”, whereas EMBO favours a system in which material is accepted from anyone but with all submissions being subjected to what it calls “light peer review”.

EMBO is planning for the system to be administered by a mosaic of EMBO and other scientfic societies. Accepted papers will receive an EMBO stamp of approval (see Nature 400, 97; 1990). The principle of not accepting unreviewed preprints has gained the support of the Asia-Pacific International Molecular Biology Network (see Nature 400, 491; 1999).

It is still unclear whether the systems will coexist within the repository or whether common submission protocols will emerge. A determining step for both PubMed Central and E-Biosci could be the creation of an international governing body, as envisaged in the original E-Biomed proposal.

Such a body would address editorial and technical matters, as well as questions such as the terms under which commercial companies might be involved.

The United States is said to favour a governing body of eminent scientists, whereas EMBO is thought to prefer a structure comprising representatives of scientific societies, charities and organizations such as the Third World Academy of Sciences.