Scientists Frustrated with Limited Access to Full-Text Documents   http://www.scienceboard.net/community/news/news.214.html

  While scientists often cite staying abreast of developments in their   field as the most common reason for reading scientific literature,   it is by far from the only reason. "Scientists perceive their   ability to access scientific and medical literature almost as an   unalienable right of their profession," observes Tamara Zemlo,   Ph.D., MPH, Director of The Science Advisory Board. The Internet   has reinforced this perception by increasing the speed and ease by   which these searches can be conducted.

  To find out what is the biggest obstacle to this ubiquitous scientific   practice, members of The Science Advisory Board participated in a poll   to address, "What makes searching scientific and medical literature   online frustrating?: Almost 80% of the 1,400 respondents stated that   limited access to full-text documents was the most annoying aspect   of online literature searches. It far exceeded the other complaints   of broken hypertext links, copyright restrictions and inadequate   search engines.

  Such sentiments will be sweet music to the ears of Public Library of   Science (PLoS) founders who espouse the philosophy that unrestricted   access to scientific and medical literature will accelerate progress   in these critical fields. Their model of offering full-text and data   of published research article--available free of charge anywhere   in the world--is still being tested. Time will tell whether the   scientists, who in theory embrace the nobility of this idea, will   choose to publish their own findings in such a venue. It continues to amaze, how researchers, despite their mounting frustration, remain blind (or paralyzed) with respect to the obvious! Why on earth would they want to keep waiting, passively, frustrated, for

This is exactly what I had experienced with our Online database IndMED [Bibliographic Database of Indian Journals, available freely from http://indmed.nic.in]. As more and more people became aware of/User of IndMED, the request for the full text of the indexed article started increasing. To my surprise, they were even requesting articles which were from journals which had online presence and the full text available for free. May be people were not aware about these?. Putting links to such articles along with the references came to mind. I experimented, but soon realised that these journal sites did reorganisation of their content quite often. Hence the links "evaporated" in no time. It was too much to expect them to use PURLs, DOI etc. So leaving the link to the home pages was a practical way to inform IndMED users about online availability of journals. This helped to some extent but  problems did not end even here. These journals changed their host and domain names. I had to put extra effort to keep track of their domains and modify our database. And once it also happened that a journal's domain name was purchased by some "unwanted content" provider. Since August 2003, NIC has a project called medIND (http://medind.nic.in). It has been designed to serve as "backend" for IndMED (I am using term 'backend' just because I could not find better word). It aims to host full content of the journals indexed in IndMED/PubMed. Here NIC takes the responsibility to digitalize and host the journals for free. In return the journal becomes freely accessible to the users. The contents of these journals are organised using a File Naming and Organising Policy. The same policy has been implemented to generate links on the fly in the IndMED database. It ensures, one-to-one link between the Reference and the Full Text of the articles. As a Design Policy, these would be persistent to end users. I hope, Bio-Medical Community will be less frustration while searching for Indian Bio-Medical Literature. But still, there is need for Open Access Archive for Indian Medical Literature. And we will make it happen very soon. ATLEAST I BELIEVE IT!!! Thanks SUKHDEV SINGH, NIC.   -----Original Message----- Friends: Here is a short message from Stevan Harnad that I received recently. I thought all of you might find it usful. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] -----Original Message----- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk] The Science Advisory Board, an international panel of 22,319 life science and medical professionals formed in 1997, has conducted a survey on "What makes searching scientific and medical literature online frustrating?": the eventual outcome of the test of a new cost-recovery model in order to gain access at last to one another's full-text articles, when they can already provide that access themselves, right now, by self-archiving their own articles?     http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html There is no question but that the research community fervently desires Open Access: Already back in 2001, for example, 34,000 biologists worldwide signed the PLoS open letter to that effect, essentially threatening to stop publishing in and refereeing for journals if they did not provide Open Access.     http://www.plos.org/about/letter.html But while researchers have proved willing and able to perform the requisite keystrokes for signing open letters, declarations and surveys clamouring for Open Access to be provided for them, it looks as if they are not yet ready to perform the few additional keystrokes it would take to actually provide that Open Access for themselves -- even when over 90% of their journals have already given them the green light to go ahead and do so, with their blessing!     http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php It looks as if nothing less than a self-archiving mandate from their funders and employers will manage to induce the thirsty research cavalry, having been duly led to the waters of Open Access Self-Archiving, to actually stoop to drink, at last!     http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php (Historians will have a jolly time sorting out why this was the case: why researcher inertia kept itself waiting, thirsty, needlessly, and despite mounting frustration, for over a decade, before grasping the optimal and inevitable that had been within their reach all along!)     http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html     http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml     Stevan Harnad http://clients.rediff.com/signature/track_sig.asp http://ads.rediff.com/RealMedia/ads/adstream_nx.cgi/www.rediffmail.com/inbox... This is exactly what I had experienced with our Online database IndMED [Bibliographic Database of Indian Journals, available freely from http://indmed.nic.in]. As more and more people became aware of/User of IndMED, the request for the full text of the indexed article started increasing. To my surprise, they were even requesting articles which were from journals which had online presence and the full text available for free. May be people were not aware about these?. Putting links to such articles along with the references came to mind. I experimented, but soon realised that these journal sites did reorganisation of their content quite often. Hence the links "evaporated" in no time. It was too much to expect them to use PURLs, DOI etc. So leaving the link to the home pages was a practical way to inform IndMED users about online availability of journals. This helped to some extent but problems did not end even here. These journals changed their host and domain names. I had to put extra effort to keep track of their domains and modify our database. And once it also happened that a journal's domain name was purchased by some "unwanted content" provider. Since August 2003, NIC has a project called medIND (http://medind.nic.in). It has been designed to serve as "backend" for IndMED (I am using term 'backend' just because I could not find better word). It aims to host full content of the journals indexed in IndMED/PubMed. Here NIC takes the responsibility to digitalize and host the journals for free. In return the journal becomes freely accessible to the users. The contents of these journals are organised using a File Naming and Organising Policy. The same policy has been implemented to generate links on the fly in the IndMED database. It ensures, one-to-one link between the Reference and the Full Text of the articles. As a Design Policy, these would be persistent to end users. I hope, Bio-Medical Community will be less frustration while searching for Indian Bio-Medical Literature. But still, there is need for Open Access Archive for Indian Medical Literature. And we will make it happen very soon. ATLEAST I BELIEVE IT!!! Thanks SUKHDEV SINGH, NIC. -----Original Message----- Friends: Here is a short message from Stevan Harnad that I received recently. I thought all of you might find it usful. Best wishes. Arun [Subbiah Arunachalam] -----Original Message----- From: Stevan Harnad [mailto:harnad@ecs.soton.ac.uk] The Science Advisory Board, an international panel of 22,319 life science and medical professionals formed in 1997, has conducted a survey on "What makes searching scientific and medical literature online frustrating?":

Scientists Frustrated with Limited Access to Full-Text Documents http://www.scienceboard.net/community/news/news.214.html

While scientists often cite staying abreast of developments in their field as the most common reason for reading scientific literature, it is by far from the only reason. "Scientists perceive their ability to access scientific and medical literature almost as an unalienable right of their profession," observes Tamara Zemlo, Ph.D., MPH, Director of The Science Advisory Board. The Internet has reinforced this perception by increasing the speed and ease by which these searches can be conducted.

To find out what is the biggest obstacle to this ubiquitous scientific practice, members of The Science Advisory Board participated in a poll to address, "What makes searching scientific and medical literature online frustrating?: Almost 80% of the 1,400 respondents stated that limited access to full-text documents was the most annoying aspect of online literature searches. It far exceeded the other complaints of broken hypertext links, copyright restrictions and inadequate search engines.

Such sentiments will be sweet music to the ears of Public Library of Science (PLoS) founders who espouse the philosophy that unrestricted access to scientific and medical literature will accelerate progress in these critical fields. Their model of offering full-text and data of published research article--available free of charge anywhere in the world--is still being tested. Time will tell whether the scientists, who in theory embrace the nobility of this idea, will choose to publish their own findings in such a venue.

It continues to amaze, how researchers, despite their mounting frustration, remain blind (or paralyzed) with respect to the obvious! Why on earth would they want to keep waiting, passively, frustrated, for the eventual outcome of the test of a new cost-recovery model in order to gain access at last to one another's full-text articles, when they can already provide that access themselves, right now, by self-archiving their own articles? http://www.arl.org/scomm/subversive/toc.html There is no question but that the research community fervently desires Open Access: Already back in 2001, for example, 34,000 biologists worldwide signed the PLoS open letter to that effect, essentially threatening to stop publishing in and refereeing for journals if they did not provide Open Access. http://www.plos.org/about/letter.html But while researchers have proved willing and able to perform the requisite keystrokes for signing open letters, declarations and surveys clamouring for Open Access to be provided for them, it looks as if they are not yet ready to perform the few additional keystrokes it would take to actually provide that Open Access for themselves -- even when over 90% of their journals have already given them the green light to go ahead and do so, with their blessing! http://romeo.eprints.org/stats.php It looks as if nothing less than a self-archiving mandate from their funders and employers will manage to induce the thirsty research cavalry, having been duly led to the waters of Open Access Self-Archiving, to actually stoop to drink, at last! http://www.eprints.org/signup/sign.php (Historians will have a jolly time sorting out why this was the case: why researcher inertia kept itself waiting, thirsty, needlessly, and despite mounting frustration, for over a decade, before grasping the optimal and inevitable that had been within their reach all along!) http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html http://www.infotoday.com/IT/oct04/poynder.shtml Stevan Harnad