PMC International (PMCI) is a collaborative effort between NLM [the National Library of Medicine], the publishers whose journal content makes up the PMC archive, and organizations in other countries that share NLM's interest in archiving life sciences literature. The long term goal of PMCI is to create a network of digital archives that can share some or all of their respective locally deposited content with others in the network. There are several reasons for doing this:
The probablity of an archive surviving over the long term is greater if there are working copies of the archive in regular use at multiple sites around the world.
A producer or funder of research literature often will be more inclined to make the primary deposit of its material to a locally or regionally affiliated archive, rather than to one operated elsewhere in the world.
In areas with limited online communications facilities, users will be better served by a national or regional archive in the vicinity....
PMCI sites must use NCBI's portable PMC (pPMC) software, which is an offshoot of the software that runs NLM's PMC system (US PMC). It is designed to manage and provide public access to a literature archive in a manner similar to that of US PMC, including the same presentation styles for articles....Portable PMC (pPMC) is a software package being developed by NLM's National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) and currently being tested by several prospective PMCI sites. When complete, it will be available for use by any organization or individual wishing to manage and provide access to a collection of journal articles and related material in a manner similar to that of NLM's PMC system....
pPMC is part of set of tools being developed by NCBI [called the Literature Archiving Software Suite, or LASS] to support the creation, management and preservation of electronic literature collections and provide access to them. The other components of LASS are: [1] NLM XML DTDs - a set of DTDs for journal articles, book chapters and related content, [2] NLM XML Authoring Tool - an add-on for Microsoft Word. It lets one use standard MS Word features to create a properly formatted NLM XML document...[3] Portable NIHMS (pNIHMS) - a software package that handles the intake of 'raw' manuscripts (word processor or other text files, image files, PDFs, etc.) and tracks them through the process of conversion to an NLM XML format and eventual deposit in an article repository....The remaining components of LASS will be made available in the public domain when development has been completed. As public domain products, the LASS packages are free for use by anyone for any purpose.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/15/2006 10:33:00 AM.
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.
