Who, What and Why?

A regular short guide to the players, stakeholders and technical terms relevant to Open Access publishing. ‘WHAT, WHO and WHY’ helps readers to become informed about the world of Open Access.

WHAT is PubMed Central?
PubMed Central is a repository of fulltext, peer-reviewed articles from life science journals. It is not a publisher itself, but instead relies on the willingness of publishers to deposit copies of articles they have published. It is easiest to think of PubMed Central as the equivalent of PubMed, but containing complete articles rather than just abstracts.

Articles in PubMed Central must be free to all users, but not necessarily from the publication date (some publishers have a 6–24 month delay). Currently PubMed Central includes over 150 journals, but the list is growing. Any journal can deposit its articles in PubMed Central as long as at least three members of its editorial board are principal investigators on research grants from major funding agencies.

WHO is behind PubMed Central?
PubMed Central was created in 2000 by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a division of the National Library of Medicine at the US National Institutes of Health. The driving force behind PubMed Central is David Lipman, NCBI’s director. PubMed Central also has a National Advisory Committee, chaired by Joshua Lederberg.

WHY is PubMed Central needed?
Think of how useful PubMed is as a repository of free abstracts. And extrapolate that to free full text. The research community would benefit enormously from having all research articles available in one place and in one format. This would allow rapid searching and text/data mining, and would make it easy to link literature to databases of various kinds.

PubMed Central also serves as a permanent archive of published research articles, safeguarding against the possibility that they are no longer available from the original source. PubMed Central has undertaken to complete the archive by scanning back issues. This project began with the 1990s literature and will proceed backwards a decade at a time.

The combination of permanent archiving, continuous unrestricted availability and full-text searching make PubMed Central a fundamental component of the Open Access future of the biomedical research literature.

www.pubmedcentral.gov