Open Access News

In a December 2005 editorial appearing in the British Medical Journal (BMJ) “How Google is changing medicine”, I introduced the idea of a central web portal to access the best medical information worldwide. Centralizing medical information currently scattered across the Internet would make it easily searchable....However, other than thinking that Google Medicine would ultimately cost a truckload of money to create (and yet produce huge dividends at the same time), I wrote the BMJ editorial with no further concrete or specific suggestions in mind. So when a number of physicians e-mailed me from around the world excited by the idea of Google Medicine, I started to think: what would Google Medicine contain? What issues might it attempt to address? How would it need to improve on what Google already does? Here are some further thoughts about Google Medicine as I envision it....From the outset, let me say that I have no interest in Google Inc, financial or otherwise, and no interest in seeing it gain more market share. I am only interested in access....[N]umerous studies show a linkage between access to information and good patient care but few have shown how search tools like Google have a positive impact on patient care. Note to self: apply to PhD programs in library science for a sabbatical on this subject....Google has benefited from the National Library of Medicine by allowing it to crawl PubMed. The irony is that some librarians have asked if Google will eventually replace PubMed, the lynchpin of medical searching....Google’s computer power and open access to the medical literature is a potential winning combination. At the very least, institutional repositories must facilitate archiving and indexing by major search tools. The bulk of research created in open access journals may not make it into MEDLINE and EMBASE or second-tier tools such as the International Pharmaceutical Abstracts. So, Google will need to index this material and ensure content from almost 600 institutions (see OAIster in the United States) is easily searchable....An historic opportunity exists for the open access movement and search engines to work together to achieve true open access. As many librarians will tell you, academia’s reliance on traditional publishing models has created a crisis for us, with crippling subscription costs being the result. We need to wrest control back for our users and establish more open models of scholarly publishing. But we also need to think about how this content is accessed and whether it will be findable....[Peter Suber said] "the more knowledge matters, the more open access to that knowledge matters." I say this is the quote of the year.