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." --