Medical research funding body the Wellcome Trust has invited tenders to find a supplier to host, manage and develop a UK version of PubMed Central, the US National Library’s free database of medical research papers. Potential suppliers have been asked to express interest by 8 March.
The WellcomeTrust and its UK partners,which include the Department of Health, Cancer Research UK and the British Heart Foundation, hope
to make a decision by late July.
The Wellcome Trust was expecting applications from a mix of suppliers,said Robert Kiley, head of systems strategy at the Wellcome Library ( click here for more news on Wellcome Trust), including publishers and experts at hosting large databases or running manuscript submission systems.
The UK version of PubMed Central would be launched early in 2007,said Kiley, and consist of three systems: a mirror of data already held in the US version (500,000 articles), a manuscript submission and tracking system, and an authenticated login enabling people to deposit articles.
Kiley said the trust wanted to make publicly accessible the research it funded, to evaluate its impact and ensure the long-term digital preservation of research papers.
“All papers will be held in a standard XML format, thus ensuring that the record of biomedicine is preserved, irrespective of changes in
software and hardware platforms,” Kiley said. From October 2006, Wellcome Trust grant holders must ensure peer-reviewed articles are deposited in the UK or US version of PubMed Central within six months, either by themselves or the journal publisher.
“If the publisher cannot accept these conditions, grant-holders will have to publish elsewhere,”Kiley said. “Our preferred route is open access.”
Posted by
Peter Suber at 3/04/2006 02:17:00 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.
