Scientific publishing. Chemists toy with the preprint future.

Last week, the giant publishing house Elsevier Science launched the first electronic archive for chemistry preprints through its ChemWeb subsidiary. The new site (preprint.chemweb.com) will be a common repository for reports on a wide range of chemistry topics and a forum for authors and readers to discuss the results. But ChemWeb could face an uphill battle in convincing authors to post their papers on the site, as many of the field's premier journals decline to accept papers that have already been posted on the Web.