---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Date: Wed, Dec 9, 2009 at 12:12 PM
Subject: Fwd: Conflating OA Repository-Content, Deposit-Locus, and
Central-Service: a response from the Wellcome Trust
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_listserver.sigmaxi.org
Cc: Stevan Harnad <amsciforum_at_gmail.com>
Begin forwarded message:
From: "Kiley ,Robert" <r.kiley_at_wellcome.ac.uk>
Date: December 9, 2009 11:07:04 AM EST (CA)
To: <harnad_at_ecs.soton.ac.uk>
Subject: FW: Conflating OA Repository-Content, Deposit-Locus, and
Central-Service: a response from the Wellcome Trust
Stevan
I posted this to the list last week -- but have not seen it. Could
you post this?
Many thanks
Robert
________________________________
From: Kiley ,Robert
Sent: 01 December 2009 21:42
To: American Scientist Open Access Forum
Subject: Conflating OA Repository-Content, Deposit-Locus, and
Central-Service: a response from the Wellcome Trust
Stevan
Your last post made a number of comments about PMC, UKPMC and the
Wellcome Trust, which I'd like to respond to:
1. Empty repositories?
You indicate that "PMC (or its emulators)" are bereft of content.
This is not the case. PMC currently has around 1.9 million full-text
articles. Looking at the compliance levels for funder mandate, we see
that around 43% of Trust funded research is made available through
UKPMC in line with our mandate. We are actively working to increase
this figure. It is also worth noting that, because of our support for
gold OA, a significant proportion of these articles are freely
available at the time of publication.
2. "National PMC's are a joke"
The idea that UKPMC is a "joke" is not shared by the Wellcome Trust,
or indeed the other 7 biomedical research funders in the UK who have
established (and funded) this repository.
You suggest that UKPMC simply holds UK content. This is not the case.
It holds **all** the PMC content, but each "locality" (UK, Canada
etc) can build services in top of that to ensure that it meets the
needs of the research community we are trying to serve.
In January 2010 we will be launching a new UKPMC site which will offer users:
A) A single access point to around 20 million bibliographic records -
drawn from PubMed, Biological Patents, Agricola and Clinical
Guidelines databases - as well as the 1.5m+ full text articles in
UKPMC
B) Additional, local content. This includes guidelines from NICE and
other NHS bodies, plus relevant (i.e. biomedical) theses derived from
EthOS. So, by way of example, when you search the new site for say
"management of stroke" you will be presented with relevant PubMed
citations, full-text articles, UK clinical guidelines etc in one
search.
C) New citation services. For every article (be it full text or just
the bibliographic citation) you will be able to see all the papers
which that paper cited, as well as all the other articles which cite
that paper.
D) New text-mining services. Our colleagues at EBI and NaCTeM have
build tools to textmine the content in UKPMC. In the first release
(January 2010) users will be able to see in a "summary box" which will
provide details of what genes/proteins, organisms etc are discussed in
the paper they are viewing. Over the next 18 months this textmining
functionality will be developed further in include chemical compounds,
disease names etc etc.
The "franchise" model that PMC uses is akin to that developed for the
human genome project inasmuch as content is mirrored to a number of
sites (e.g. NCBI, Sanger, and DDBJ) but each centre develops their own
interface to this content. So, the core content at PMC, UKPMC and PMC
Canada is identical -- but each centre will develop their own
valued-added services.
The UKPMC Funders Group - led by the Wellcome Trust - are, with the
support of European partners, exploring the possibility of creating a
single, Europe-wide OA repository for peer reviewed biomedical
research papers -- a Europe PMC. A workshop to discuss this is taking
place on the 2nd December at the Berlin 7 meeting. [See:
http://www.berlin7.org/spip.php?article74]
3. Why the Trust favours the author-pays model
***
The Wellcome Trust has always argued that:
A) dissemination costs are simply research costs
B) publishers add-value to the research article
It follows, therefore, that these costs have to be met -- and that is
what the Wellcome Trust (and others) do.
It is also worth pointing out that when an APC fee is met, the Trust
requires the publisher to provide a number of services:
A) Deposit the final version - marked up to an XML standard - directly
into PMC, where it must be made freely available at the time of
publication. [So, no embargo, no "email request buttons", and no work
on behalf of the author.]
B) Attach a licence to these articles, thus ensuring that anyone who
want to re-use the work (e.g. text-mining, creating translations,
re-using for different audiences etc) can do so. Whether such rights
extend to author manuscripts is, at best, unclear.
C) These articles can also be included in the OA subset, thus allowing
institutions (and others) to harvest, via OAI, relevant full-text
content.
Best regards
Robert Kiley
Wellcome Trust
Received on Wed Dec 09 2009 - 17:23:25 GMT