PubMed: bridging the information gap

Johanna McEntyre; David Lipman

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Pubmedcentral: a new perspective
s Vinod

Published on: 28 June 2002

Published on: (28 June 2002)

Pubmedcentral: a new perspective
s Vinod, Center for Cybermedicine and Internet Research
Pubmedcentral: a new perspective
Sir,
As Mc Entyre and Lipman has truly stated, Pubmed Central is a new innovative design allowing access to free full text literature. A recent visit to Pubmed Central [1] revealed that a total of 23 journals were available and another 8 journals were soon going to be available through the website.
Though these number seems to meagre compared to the total numbe...
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Pubmedcentral: a new perspective
Sir,
As Mc Entyre and Lipman has truly stated, Pubmed Central is a new innovative design allowing access to free full text literature. A recent visit to Pubmed Central [1] revealed that a total of 23 journals were available and another 8 journals were soon going to be available through the website.
Though these number seems to meagre compared to the total number of journals listed in databases like medline, it is surely a signal for change.
The advent of Pubmed made hitherto obscure journals come to the mainstream. The differences between journals are now slowly dissappearing. This would have far reaching changes in the field of publishing too.Studies[2] have found that users find e journals easy to use and were frequently used to check references - is a clear indication that e- journals would have a bright future.
The advent of Pubmed central has envisaged not only free to access literature, but also proved third party hosting of medical literature as a feasible model.
The implications of these are far reaching. The identity of journals are fast diminishing to 'kitemarks' or 'trustmarks'.
Thus the survival strategy of journals have shifted from selling literature to giving additional services as with journals like bmj[3].
[1]Pubmedcentral http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov accessed on 28 june 2002 [2]Sathe,Grady,Guise Print versus electronic journals: a preliminary investigation into the effect of journal format on research processes J Med Libr Assoc. 2002 April; 90 (2): 235243 [3]BMJ http://www.bmj.com accessed on 28 june 2002
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Competing Interests: None declared.