The gatekeeper and academic article access

Post date: May 24, 2011 5:4:47 AM

Part One

The UK equivalent of PubMed in the U.S.A., not surprisingly named UK PubMed, is a

free online resource offering access to information sources for biomedical and health researchers

Do have a care! Access with no restriction is NOT necessarily equivalent to fully open access. I am uncertain about what nuance differentiates one from the other. I shall find out shortly and report back.

Part Two

The UK PubMed Central blog recently announced that an increasing amount of its content is open access, see chart reproduced above. Most helpful of all was the post's distinction between unrestricted access and open access:

all content in UKPMC can be accessed without any restriction

in contrast,

only a subset of the "unrestricted access" content is fully open access

The fully open access articles can be

• • downloaded

  • re-used, typically for non-commercial purposes

  • are still protected by copyright, but available under Creative Commons licensing for more liberal re-distribution.

UK PubMed even has a "Labs" section. A new search engine is currently in development. A particularly interesting feature is the Question-and-Answer type function called EvidenceFinder. According to UK PubMed, EvidenceFinder is now available for the curious to test-drive. As yet, it is at an early stage, prior to public beta.