ESP started as a personal project of Robert J. Robbins. Now, the project has received support from the US Department of Energy for the electronic republication of hundreds of papers defining the Foundations of Classical Genetics.

The ultimate goal of the ESP project is to provide tools for electronic scholarly publications, so that others may also undertake projects at this site. When the technical infrastructure for the site has been fully developed, adding new topic projects should require no more work than that necessary to produce the documents themselves.