Richard Wray, Medical researchers bankroll innovative online database, The Guardian, May 11, 2005. Excerpt: 'Some of Britain's leading medical research funders have banded together to finance the country's most comprehensive online repository of medical knowledge. The multimillion-pound UK PubMed Central project is a big boost to proponents of open access to scientific research. It will enable academic researchers to post papers published either online or in subscription-based scientific journals, on a single searchable database which anybody can access free. The project is being bankrolled by a group of medical funders including the Wellcome Trust, the British Heart Foundation and the Arthritis Research Campaign with the support of the Joint Information Systems Committee, an expert advisory body indirectly funded by government. The group yesterday called for organisations interested in running the database to submit tenders for the project by June 10. They plan to create a permanent, freely accessible digital archive of peer-reviewed papers as a result of research they have funded....UK PubMed Central will use the same software as its US counterpart and include a fully searchable archive of articles from both sites. It will also provide links to other online resources, such as gene databases, which will allow academics and physicians to read recent research papers and view the data on which they are based. "We are committed to achieving the maximum impact from the research we fund, making the findings accessible to those who most want to see them," said Dr Mark Walport, director of the Wellcome Trust. Professor Jeremy Pearson, associate medical director at the British Heart Foundation, added: "The BHF supports the principle of free public access to the published research it has funded." '
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/11/2005 08:07:00 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.
