PubMed Central: Government as Publisher?

PubMed Central: Government as Publisher?

Deborah Gesensway

If some of the country's leading biomedical thinkers have their way, the process of scientific publishing, which has served clinicians and the public extraordinarily well for the past several centuries, will undergo a revolutionary change. In this new system, print journals would no longer control distribution of the results of scientific investigation. Instead, access to all of the world's biomedical literature would be available free of charge to anyone with access to a computer and the Internet.

This concept is particularly important because it is not simply some theorists' futurist, millennial predictions. It is already taking shape as PubMed Central, a far-reaching project under way at the U.S. government's National Library of Medicine (NLM), part of the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

The Government's Plan

Launched in January 2000, PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov) aims ultimately to be a digital archive of the full text of all original research articles listed in the NLM's MEDLINE database. This archive would be accessible free of charge on the Internet through the PubMed search engine (http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez). The goal is to allow anyone searching MEDLINE through PubMed to click on citations of interest and be taken automatically to PubMed Central, where he or she could then read the full text of the selected articles without having to pay a publisher for the privilege.

Under the original proposal, PubMed Central would also become an electronic publisher in its own right. It would post on-line scientific reports that are screened but not formally peer reviewed. This part of the project, tentatively called PubMed Express, is on hold, at least until the PubMed Central archive is well established. PubMed Central's advisory committee is slated to discuss the future of PubMed Express at its March 2001 meeting.