Open Access News

News from the open access movement


Saturday, December 22, 2007

Linking from a PubMed abstract to OA full-text on Michigan's IR

Sandy Swanson, University of Michigan’s digital repository now available through PubMed, MHSLA blog, December 21, 2007.  (Thanks to Charles Bailey.)  Excerpt:

From MLA Focus:

Deep Blue and PubMed LinkOut: A Higher Profile for University of Michigan Research

Researchers who find articles by University of Michigan (UM) authors in PubMed can now directly-and for free-link to the full text using Deep Blue, UM’s digital repository, via PubMed’s LinkOut feature. Deep Blue is an online archive that preserves and provides access to UM intellectual and creative work. It is the first institutional repository to provide such links.

To see all the items in Deep Blue that are in PubMed, enter “loprovdeepblue [sb]” in the PubMed search box. At this posting, there are over 8,800 articles.

I don’t find a way to add the Deep Blue collection in the LinkOut submission utility, and I don’t see a “free full text” button on the abstracts. However, Deep Blue’s link icon can be added to a library’s shared MyNCBI account; use Configure > PubMed > LinkOut > Miscellaneous > MLibrary (Deep Blue) (DeepBlue).

Update.  See Stevan Harnad's comment, Deposit institutionally, harvest centrally, Open Access Archivangelism, December 23, 2007.  Excerpt:

...Congratulations to the University of Michigan and PubMed for adding this excellent and timely feature (to both PubMed and Michigan's Institutional Repository [IR], Deep Blue)! But why stop there?

The implications are obvious: Central Repositories [CRs] (like PubMed Central and Arxiv and CogPrints) should not be deposited in directly, because that merely complicates and competes with a systematic worldwide policy of depositing all institutional research output in each institution's own, OAI-compliant IR. Institutions are the primary research providers. They have the greatest stake in ensuring that all their own research output is maximally visible, accessible, and usable, thereby maximizing the institution's research impact. Institutions are also the best placed to showcase, monitor and reward the self-archiving of their own research output.

All institutions should mandate that all their research article output must be deposited in their own IR. Research funders (like NIH) should also mandate that all the research article output from the research they fund must be deposited in the fundee's own institution's IR.
Then CRs like PubMed Central as well as indexers like PubMed (or Thompson ISI or Scopus or Google Scholar) can either link to or harvest from the network of interoperable, OAI-compliant IRs....

And remember that the Web era means distributed content provision and central harvesting, Google-style. It is not, as in paper days, that all the content needs to go in one central physical space.

Swan, A., Needham, P., Probets, S., Muir, A., Oppenheim, C., O’Brien, A., Hardy, R., Rowland, F. and Brown, S. (2005) Developing a model for e-prints and open access journal content in UK further and higher education. Learned Publishing 18 (1). pp. 25-40.

Abstract: A study carried out for the UK Joint Information Systems Committee examined models for the provision of access to material in institutional and subject-based archives and in open access journals....A "harvesting" model is recommended....