Initiative could give free access to UK medical research
http://www.100md.com
《英国医生杂志》
Most of the United Kingdom's new biomedical research could be freely available this time next year if a consortium led by the Wellcome Trust gets its way. Next week the consortium will advertise for a technical partner to set up a UK "mirror" of PubMed Central, the free online archive of life science literature administered by the US National Library of Medicine.
As well as making available the data held in PubMed Central, the UK archive would allow the ingestion of local peer reviewed articles arising from research funded by the consortium partners.
Potential partners include the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Department of Health, Cancer Research UK, and the British Heart Foundation, who together fund most biomedical research in the United Kingdom.
The Wellcome Trust has already announced that it is making deposition of the author's final accepted (peer reviewed) manuscript in an open access archive a condition of funding, and the Research Councils UK looks set to follow their lead ( BMJ 2005;330: 923, 23 Apr). A study commissioned by a committee of the UK's further and higher education funding bodies found that only 3% of authors would not comply with such a request from their funders.
By making deposition of the final manuscript a condition of funding, UK funders are going beyond the situation in the United States. In a climbdown from its initial proposals, the US National Institutes of Health is requesting, rather than mandating, its grantees to make the final version of their papers available for public display in PubMed Central within a year of publication. In both countries, however, publishers are equally concerned that such proposals will hit their journal subscriptions as the publisher's final version differs from the author's final version only because of technical editing.
In a list of frequently asked questions, the Wellcome Trust confronts head on the possibility of publishers refusing to accept the condition of authors depositing an electronic copy of their paper in PubMed Central or its UK equivalent. Its answer is that its researchers "will have to reconsider where they first submit their work for publication."
While the Wellcome Trust's position of making the deposition of research papers in an open access archive was the exception rather than the rule, UK journals may have been tempted to tough it out. If most research articles from the UK come with the same strings attached, this strategy will no longer be possible.(Tony Delamothe)
As well as making available the data held in PubMed Central, the UK archive would allow the ingestion of local peer reviewed articles arising from research funded by the consortium partners.
Potential partners include the Medical Research Council, the Biotechnology and Biological Sciences Research Council, the Department of Health, Cancer Research UK, and the British Heart Foundation, who together fund most biomedical research in the United Kingdom.
The Wellcome Trust has already announced that it is making deposition of the author's final accepted (peer reviewed) manuscript in an open access archive a condition of funding, and the Research Councils UK looks set to follow their lead ( BMJ 2005;330: 923, 23 Apr). A study commissioned by a committee of the UK's further and higher education funding bodies found that only 3% of authors would not comply with such a request from their funders.
By making deposition of the final manuscript a condition of funding, UK funders are going beyond the situation in the United States. In a climbdown from its initial proposals, the US National Institutes of Health is requesting, rather than mandating, its grantees to make the final version of their papers available for public display in PubMed Central within a year of publication. In both countries, however, publishers are equally concerned that such proposals will hit their journal subscriptions as the publisher's final version differs from the author's final version only because of technical editing.
In a list of frequently asked questions, the Wellcome Trust confronts head on the possibility of publishers refusing to accept the condition of authors depositing an electronic copy of their paper in PubMed Central or its UK equivalent. Its answer is that its researchers "will have to reconsider where they first submit their work for publication."
While the Wellcome Trust's position of making the deposition of research papers in an open access archive was the exception rather than the rule, UK journals may have been tempted to tough it out. If most research articles from the UK come with the same strings attached, this strategy will no longer be possible.(Tony Delamothe)