Summary: What is needed for Canadian biomedical research output isn't yet another (this time Canadian) PubMed Central: What is needed is that all Canadian (and US and UK) biomedical research output (as well as all the output of all the other scientific and scholarly disciplines, worldwide) should be made Open Access (OA) for all users, webwide. And the way to accomplish that is for the institutions and funders of the researchers to mandate that they deposit each article, immediately upon acceptance for publication, into each author's own OA Institutional Repository (IR). That is the solution that will systematically scale up to cover all research, from all institutions, across all fields, across all countries -- not the creation, willy-nilly, of central repositories like PubMed Central to deposit it into directly. PubMed Central should instead be a central OAI harvester, harvesting the biomedical research output of all the (distributed, local) IRs.
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.
