In This Issue:
"ClinicalTrials.gov"
Launched
49
High-Tech Projects
New
Version of PubMed
Marcetich
Named Head of Index Section
New
Policy on Clinical Alerts
NLM
Long Range Plan in Place
New
Regents Named
"Racism,
Sexism and Poverty are Hazardous to Our Health"
Lakota
Officials and Cheyenne River Sioux Tribe Leaders Visit Library
MEDLINEplus
Adds Medical Encyclopedia
 "PubMed
Central" Debuts
NLM
"Adopts" D.C.'s Woodrow Wilson Senior High School
Hospital
and Health Administration Index
Images
from the History of Medicine Rescanned
NLM's
"Breath of Life" Exhibit Extended Through March 2001
In Every Issue:
Names
in the News
Products
and Publications
NLM
In Print
|
"PubMed Central" Debuts
Goal is to Improve Access to Scientific Information
You may have originally heard it called "E-biomed." However, by
the time it debuted on the National Institutes of Health web site in
February, the web-based repository for primary research reports in
the life sciences was christened "PubMed Central."
In announcing its creation, NIH declared that "This repository -
which we consider to be the initial site in an international system
- will be called PubMed Central, based on its natural integration
with the existing PubMed biomedical literature database. PubMed
itself will extend its coverage of the life sciences and continue
its linkage to external online journals."
The brainchild of former NIH Director Dr. Harold E. Varmus, who
wanted to make scientific information more freely available, PubMed
Central is an archive of free full-text articles from journals
indexed by one of the major abstracting and indexing services.
PubMed Central will also include new journals that have at least
three editorial board members that are principal investigators on
research grants from major funding agencies. The advisability of
including non-peer- reviewed reports is being debated by some in the
scientific community. The non- peer-reviewed "Preprint" section is
currently under discussion by the PubMed Central Advisory Board.
Twelve journals have already agreed to participate in PubMed
Central. These are Arthritis Research, Breast Cancer Research,
British Medical Journal, Canadian Medical Association Journal,
Critical Care Forum, Current Controlled Trials, Genome Biology,
Molecular Biology of the Cell, Nucleic Acids Research, The Plant
Cell, Plant Physiology and Proceedings of the National Academy of
Science of the United States of America (PNAS). A sidebar for each
full text article provides a link to PubMed for the article
citation, related articles and author bibliographies.
PubMed Central will have three access routes:
- users of PubMed will see a special icon next to articles that
are in PubMed Central;
- there will be a "search" feature for PubMed Central articles
on the PMC home page; and
- contents and archives can be browsed issue by issue.
Dr. David J. Lipman, Director of NLM's National Center for
Biotechnology Information, notes that the Medical Research Councils
of the UK and Canada are strongly supportive of PubMed Central and
sent observers to the first meeting of its advisory council, in
March. NLM Director Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg has said that one of
NLM's indispensable roles in this project is to help set formatting
and classification standards for the community. |
