PubMed/Medline records have grown linearly since the late 1960s. But GenBank and other databases show closer to exponential growth. NCBI serves up to 1.4m users a day and these users are downloading ~2.25 Terabytes each day. Generally speaking, growth in usage parallels closely the growth in the amount of data in the database. NCBI spends 90% of its budget on people. 20% is for basic research with the other 80% involved in 'production'. 75% or more or the production side is involved with sequence data....
PMC started as an archive for journals who choose to deposit their content. XML DTD adopted by HighWire, JStor, PLoS, Atypon and others.
Portable PMC allows quick setup of a local mirror of PMC (e.g., Wellcome Trust and BL in the UK).
Literature Archiving Software Suite (LASS): Takes books and articles in NLM DTD and allows search, rendering for the web, etc. Now working on a Word-based authoring tool.
PMC submission system. PMC submission rate is still very low (<5% of NIH grantees), which was predictable because it's not mandatory and makes no difference to future funding. A lot of discussion now about whether it should be made mandatory. 80-85% of grantees know about the policy, but are often sketchy on the details.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/18/2006 12:29:00 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.
