Entrepreneurs are already finding business opportunities in the growing volume of OA literature available from the NIH. From a press release issued today by Presenter, Inc.:
Mobile Med Journal Abstracts, delivered to physician's handset via MMS is one of the most extreme innovations rising above the horizon. As NIH pushes forward the Open Access for medical journals, massive [numbers of] journal articles will soon become freely available to the public. Innovative information distribution technologies complementing the proliferation of journal database are on the rise. Presenter, Inc.'s Mobile Med Journal Abstracts is the first to explore the handset's potential as a science communication platform....
Once the [new OA mandate at the NIH] takes full effect in April 2008--and as the sheer volume of article archives soars, new technologies geared toward better and quicker information distribution may become gadget of choice for savvy users. Presenter, Inc.'s journal abstracts over mobile phone is one of these gadgets.
Presenter, Inc., a pioneer in Internet and mobile computing technologies for business communication, recently launched a pilot run of journal abstracts over mobile phone. Run in two cities in China, the pilot covers some 150 doctors who receive journal abstracts in text and images through MMS messaging. MMS messaging is the multimedia equivalent of the hugely popular SMS (text) messaging....
The choice of mobile phone is not so much driven by novelty as it's for necessity. Because unlike their U.S. counterparts, Chinese doctors have only limited access to the Internet at workplace. Consequently, the ubiquitous mobile phone is the best gadget to channel the journal information.
And it proves to work so far....
"Our goal and focus is to become a premiere mobile publisher for science and medical knowledge communication...." says Eric Chen, Founder and CEO of Presenter, Inc. "...We will dramatically reshape the landscape of how knowledge is shared." ...
PS: I can't find a web site for the Beijing-based Presenter, Inc., but I'm pretty sure it's not the same as the Presenter, Inc. acquired by Webex in 2003.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 2/19/2008 08:20:00 AM.
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.
