Daniel Dupont, NECTAR for Your Health: Revamping U.S. medical research means unifying data, Scientific American, January 2004. (Only a small portion is currently free online, but I believe that in a couple of weeks, the full-text will be free online.) An introduction to the NIH's NECTAR (National Electronic Clinical Trials and Research Network) project to accelerate research and discovery in medicine. Excerpt: "The way things work today is considered wildly inefficient, notes Daniel R. Masys, director of biomedical informatics at the University of California at San Diego. 'As an institution, or perhaps as a drug company, you have a scientific question in mind, consult with biostatisticians and determine the number of people needed and specifications to answer the question, write the forms for the questions and data, hire people to type the data into databases, and then at the end you publish a paper,' Masys explains. The primary data, however, remain the property of the institution. 'You keep your own data, and the next trial, you do it all over again,' he says. NECTAR will change all that, states Stephen I. Katz, director of the National Institute of Arthritis and Musculoskeletal and Skin Diseases....It will consolidate data in a user-friendly, Internet-based system." (Thanks to Garrett Eastman.)
Posted by
Peter Suber at 12/17/2003 04:28:00 PM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
