As a growing number of biologists formally share their papers in online repositories before any peer review or journal publication, it’s often said that they are catching up with physicists, who have posted preprints in the online arXiv server since 1991. But biomedical scientists actually made a start earlier. science 
Although there was an early experiment in the 1960s with the central distribution of paper preprints in the biomedical sciences, these sciences have not been early adopters of electronic preprint servers. arxiv
The Information Exchange Group:
an experiment in communication
by
Errett C. Albritton. Presented before
The Institute on Advances in Biomedical Communication.
March 9, 1965. pdf