[LIS-Forum] Fw: [SOAF] Medical researchers bankroll innovative online database

[Subbiah Arunachalam]

Friends:

Good news for biomedical researchers! When will we do a similar thing in 
India and the rest of the Third World? The technology is available, and all 
the software needed is free. The costs are low and the benefits great. All 
we need to do is to make up our minds!

Arun
[Subbiah Arunachalam]

 Medical researchers bankroll innovative online database
 Richard Wray
 Wednesday May 11, 2005
 The Guardian
 http://www.guardian.co.uk/business/story/0,3604,1480943,00.html

 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.

 The archive will be similar to PubMed Central, the US-based open
 access repository, which launched in 2000 and is run by the national
 center for biotechnology information, a division of the national
 library of medicine at the US national institutes of health, one of
 the largest backers of medical research in the world.

 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."

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