CAS

	CAS gets ahead of itself with pre-print abstracts

Electronic pre-prints are now being abstracted by the Chemical Abstracts Service (CAS), the company says, although it estimates that pre-prints will amount to no more than 1% of its database this year.

Several organisations are now offering science pre-print servers, non-peer-reviewed versions of research papers. Physicists have had the facility for some time at LANL while the biomedical community has just seen the launch of BioMed Central, which will make papers, including pre-prints, freely available online. ChemWeb, meanwhile, has initiated a pre-print server for the chemical community, which launches July 2000. The CAS abstracts will be available through the usual electronic search services, such as SciFinder, STN and Chemical Abstracts on CD.

To qualify for abstraction, CAS expects a pre-print to have a permanent web presence, as well as a fixed address for citation purposes.