National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) has added a new wrinkle [1] to the LinkOut functionality in PubMed. LinkOut has been providing direct connections from article abstracts to fulltext articles for several years. LinkOut has been predicated on participating libraries uploading their journal holdings to address the "appropriate copy problem" [2]. With the swelling ranks of free online medical journals, NCBI has chosen to maintain an internal roster of free medical journals and provide credit to participating libraries through display of the library's logo.
Actually, the Open Access movement is demonstrating to NCBI what many libraries understood in the late 1990's. A&I database vendors cannot use proprietary linking technologies, expecting every library to upload journal subscription information. OpenURL technology accommodates the fluid nature of today's electronic journal milieu. When a library decides to incorporate a new ejournal into its collection, a database record is modified locally and all A&I services which are OpenURL-compliant instantly reflect the new state of affairs for that library's patrons.
[1] Szeliga T. New LinkOut Library Icons Option: Display on Free Full Text Citations. NLM Tech Bull. 2005 Jan-Feb;(342):e8.
[2] Beit-Arie O. et al. Linking to the Appropriate Copy: Report of a DOI-Based Prototype. D-Lib Magazine 7(9) 2001 Sept.
Posted by
George Porter at 3/02/2005 06:39:00 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.
