© 2000 by Oxford University Press
Journal of the National Cancer Institute, Vol. 92, No. 5, 374,
March 1, 2000
© 2000 Oxford University Press
NEWS |
NIH Launches PubMed Central
When then director of the National Institutes of Health, Harold Varmus, M.D., announced last year his vision for the future of medical publishing, he talked of radically changing the way research results are circulated. He conjured images of a central database where researchers would deposit their findings prior to peer review, accelerating the pace of discovery, and in the process usurping much of the power held by large medical journals.
The ensuing furor—much of it from journals—drove Varmus to scale back his plans, plans which have materialized as PubMed Central, a warehouse of full-text articles from traditional peer-reviewed journals.
Project chief David Lipman, M.D., director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information, explained the change in focus: "The reality is that the life sciences community is not that interested in having nonpeer-reviewed articles on the Web. We want to keep that option open in case the community changes and opinions change. But right now we’re mainly concentrating on building up our peer-reviewed content."
A section of the site Lipman called "PubMed Express" may eventually host articles screened by independent editorial boards prior to peer review. Genomics researchers have expressed interest in this section as a way of reporting their results more quickly. Lipman said he was not sure when PubMed Express would be launched.
In the meantime, PubMed Central has enrolled a modest cache of journals, including Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences, the Canadian Medical Association Journal, and Molecular Biology of the Cell. PubMed Central will post articles from the journals a month or two after print publication.
All of this adds up to a much smaller endeavor than Varmus originally envisioned; posting full-text articles on the Web has become routine for most journals. Science publishing giant Elsevier Science, Amsterdam, for example, hosts 1,100 journals on its ScienceDirect site, and a browse through the NIH Library Web site reveals several hundred more.
The difference? These commercial sites require a subscription, while PubMed Central, like the other databases housed at the National Library of Medicine, is free.
The Web address for PubMed Central is http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov.
CiteULike 
Connotea 
Del.icio.us What's this?
| ||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||||