Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, July 07, 2007

NLM joins the DLF

The US National Library of Medicine (NLM) has joined the Digital Library Federation (DLF).  For details, see the blogged announcement by Peter Brantley, the Executive Director of the DLF.  Excerpt:

I am thrilled to be able to announce that the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM), the world's largest medical library, has joined my organization, the Digital Library Federation (DLF), as its 36th Strategic Member. The NLM joins the U.S. Library of Congress, the U.S. National Archives and Records Administration (NARA), the British Library, Oxford University, and many of the most prestigious U.S. research libraries in the DLF's efforts to shape and define the preservation and access of digital cultural and educational resources for the public community.

NLM is most widely known for Medline, the national Clinical Trials database, the PubMed database of journal articles, and the PubMedCentral (PMC) database of over one million full-text journal articles in the health sciences. It has been a leader in many other areas of note, including the Visible Human Project, and the preservation of much rare information on the international history and development of medicine - for example, the unique Islamic Medical Manuscripts collection.

The NLM is a leading proponent of open-access. In the midst of high-profile commercial digitization projects, many people do not realize that the NLM has long been at the forefront of journal digitization, and with the assistance of the Wellcome Trust and JISC in the U.K., has facilitated the entry in the public domain of hundreds of thousands of important medical articles....