Open Access News

Update. Here's an excerpt from the text:

Web-based search engines are transforming our use of the medical literature....Although we continue to read the print issues of journals and to browse current issues online, we are now using links from Google...and other search engines, as well as citation links in other articles, to gain direct access to the articles we want....“What readers see now are articles,” [John] Sack [Director of Highwire Press] said recently. “They don’t see articles bound in the context of issues or in the context of well-known journals. This has been happening for a while, but it has been greatly accelerated by the Internet and by Google and other search engines that are indexing everything that is out there.”...The rapid changes are illustrated by data compiled by HighWire Press. In June 2005, Google provided the majority (56.4 percent) of the referrals from search engines to articles in HighWirehosted journals...PubMed accounted for 8.7 percent, Google Scholar 3.7 percent, and Yahoo 3.4 percent....When he first saw similar data earlier in the year, Sack recalled, he was “surprised that Google had greatly surpassed PubMed and that a new product such as Google Scholar had approached half of PubMed’s referrals within a few months.”....Because of the limits of other online sources, central electronic repositories of journals and articles serve a critical archival function, according to Dr. David Lipman, the director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the National Library of Medicine, home to PubMed and PubMed Central....Central repositories can also store supplemental data and may permit more detailed searches and a greater ability to retrieve and manipulate the underlying information than is possible with papers that may be archived in different formats at different sites. “Biomedical research has changed,” noted Lipman. “Every paper has more and more data. People are not just reading these papers. Researchers want to compute on the underlying data.” The NIH is seeking to expand public access to the research it sponsors and to increase the usefulness of PubMed Central. As of May 2, 2005, the NIH has asked the investigators it supports to submit voluntarily to PubMed Central an electronic copy of any scientific report, on acceptance for publication....However, the initial response to the voluntary policy has been slow. With 100 percent participation, about 5500 peer-reviewed manuscripts that have been accepted but not yet published — equivalent to about 10 percent of the articles indexed monthly by PubMed — would be submitted to PubMed Central each month, according to Lipman. As of July 9, 2005, 340 such unpublished manuscripts (or about 165 per month) had been submitted — a participation rate of only 3 percent....In December 2005, Senators Joseph Lieberman (D-Conn.) and Thad Cochran (R-Miss.) introduced legislation that would require the public posting of all NIH-funded peer-reviewed manuscripts at PubMed Central within six months of their publication. Failure to comply could result in the loss of public funding for federal employees or grantees....Search engines and the Internet are not only changing the medical literature. They are also challenging the traditional economics of scholarly publishing and fueling heated debate about the extent to which the biomedical literature should be accessible online and available without charge to the user.