Laura Landro, The Informed Patient: New Help Making Sense of Medical Research, Wall Street Journal, June 15, 2005 (accessible only to subscriber). Excerpt: 'In the most ambitious effort yet to disseminate information about medical studies, a consortium of medical-journal publishers and patient-advocacy groups is unveiling a Web site to help consumers navigate the often bewildering world of health research. The objective of the new site, patientINFORM.org, is to present the most up-to-date and important research available about the diagnosis and treatment of cancer, heart disease and diabetes. The site will offer free access to selected medical-journal articles, and provide plain-language explanations of what the studies mean, how they compare with what's already known, and how patients should weigh them in making treatment decisions. The three groups involved in the patientINFORM project -- the American Cancer Society, the American Diabetes Association and the American Heart Association -- represent conditions that account for nearly two out of every three deaths in this country, and more disease groups may join. To select studies for the site, the groups will review hundreds of published medical studies each month from more than two dozen publishers whose journals include the New England Journal of Medicine and the Annals of Internal Medicine. They will use their own experts to interpret the research in lay language for consumers, and then along with the interpretations, the site will provide free access to the original journal studies that are otherwise available only by subscription. One major publication, the Journal of the American Medical Association, has elected not to provide free content on the site, but the disease groups still expect to independently publish summaries of JAMA research. The site, which is still in a pilot phase, will begin posting study findings next month.' (Thanks to Nick Manetto.)
(PS: patientINFORM provides OA to lay summaries or translations of research articles, not OA to research articles themselves. It's a valuable service but it does not make OA to research articles less necessary or less urgent.)
Update. The WSJ edition of Landro's article is no longer free for non-subscribers. But there's still a free edition available from the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette.
Posted by
Peter Suber at 6/16/2005 10:04:00 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.
