As you know, Medline is by far and away the most important abstracting
and indexing service in the life sciences and most researchers access
Medline through PubMed. If you find a paper through PubMed and that paper
is available electronically you get a link through to the publisher's
site with the full-text (that you can follow only if you have access
rights). For example, see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/
query.fcgi?cmd=3DRetrieve&db=3DPubMed&list_uids=3D11857108&dopt=3DAbstract=
It struck me that it would encourage life sciences authors to
self-archive if there was also a link from the PubMed record to the
self-archived version of the paper. It should be possible to use the
'link out' feature to add the authors' version to the record (see
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/linkout/). It might even be possible
to provide an icon on the main record page next to the link to the
publisher's version.
I wondered if any repositories are already offering this service to
authors i.e., if an author deposits their version in the local repository
the repository will make the PubMed link? This could be a powerful tool
for encouraging the life scientist as they know that their version will be
accessed by anybody who does not have access to the publisher's version.
(Apologies for cross-posting.)
David C Prosser PhD
Director
SPARCEurope
E-mail:david.prosser_at_bodley.ox.ac.uk
Tel: 44 (0) 1865 284 451
Mobile:+44 (0) 7974 673 888
http://www.sparceurope.org
Received on Thu Aug 28 2003 - 15:26:30 BST