Re: PubMed Central OAI-compliance

From: Brian Lynch <blynch_at_stfx.ca>
Date: Thu, 8 Jan 2004 20:04:45 +0000

In November 2003, PubMed Central announced the free availability of
open-source software to journal publishers and/or archivers, that enables
a standardized Journal Archiving and Interchange Document Type Definition
[JAIDTD] to be employed for all archives of biomedical journals, and
for the original electronic publications. Their intention is that JAIDTD
would become a universal publication standard.

PubMed Central [http:pubmedcentral.nih.gov] aims to become a centralized
digital archival library that provides free access to the full text of
all peer-reviewed life-science [including biomedical] research articles
- in essence, a full-text version corresponding to the MedLine [PubMed]
abstracts. Ideally, all self-archiving or institutional archiving would
follow this standard.

Our questions:

How many institutions archiving publications of their researchers,
and/or self-archivers of their own publications, have [or will have]
adopted JAIDTD, or are we risking a new Tower of Babel through a variety
of archiving formats that are only partially interconvertible?

Brian Lynch
Lai im Lancaster
Journal Retrodigitization Project
Department of Chemistry
St. Francis Xavier University
Antigonish, Nova Scotia B2G 2W5, Canada
Received on Thu Jan 08 2004 - 20:04:45 GMT