The place of eprints in scholarly information delivery

The continuing high costs of scholarly information provision have encourage d the proliferation of eprint servers. We have seen the establishment of th e Chemistry Preprint Server, PhilSci Archive and ClinMed, to mention just t hree examples. Both the well-established and the evolving eprint repositori es offer hope that academic libraries can continue to provide access to req uired scholarly information at reasonable cost. The paper describes the adv antages of eprint servers and possible obstacles to their acceptance.