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This fact sheet was provided by the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the American Association of Publishers
Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division
August 2004
How To Access Medical Information
Publishers and their library partners have invested hundreds of millions of dollars in the past decade to improve access to the biomedical journal literature. By creating electronic services that deliver this information directly to the desktop of physicians, researchers, and other health professionals, the latest medical information is immediately available to those most in need of immediate access. In addition, by making information services available through libraries (either under license or via free access), other communities get access, including students and the general public. The following describes some of the ways publishers make medical research results widely and readily available:
§ Publishers actively participate in literature retrieval systems that make it possible to search the literature and identify relevant articles. The U.S. National Library of Medicine's PubMed (http://www.pubmed.gov) is a free web-based service with data about the biomedical journal literature, established and maintained in cooperation with publishers. It provides essential summary information about articles published within medical journals worldwide. PubMed contains citations and abstracts from 14 million articles appearing in nearly 5,000 biomedical journals covered by MEDLINE, dating back to 1966. Launched in 1997, the usage of PubMed has grown to 60 million searches per month—an increase of more than 10-fold in the past 5 years—as a consequence of the cooperative arrangements established with publishers. Publishers supply MEDLINE with the necessary abstract data (more than 80% now submitted directly upon publication) and provide web links that enable both medical research professionals and the general public to locate the full text of the articles, which are made available from the publishers' own web sites.
§ Publishers enable electronic access to their journals via flexible licensing arrangements to a wide range of customers, including college and university libraries, medical schools, hospitals, and public libraries. Most licenses let libraries give free access to any member of the public who is permitted to use the library on a walk-in basis. In the United States, most state-funded university libraries are open to the public.
§ Publishers endorse the practice of interlibrary loan that lets librarians get their patrons copies of articles from journals to which a given library might not subscribe. Articles are generally easy to locate and can be obtained rapidly obtained in this manner. The publisher receives no income and most libraries charge either nothing or a modest handling fee for processing an interlibrary loan. A branch public library can obtain a copy of any article for a taxpayer in this way. Publishers endorse this system of library privilege.
§ Publishers offer free and immediate alerting of published research via their own websites, whereby most publishers openly post listings of the tables of contents and provide free access to the abstracts of published articles are posted, and offer email alerting and pay-per-view article access for interested readers. Most journals offer full-text articles for a fraction of the cost of subscription---often as little as $3.
§ Publishers also work with document delivery services that provide readers with quick access to printed copies of individual articles; for example, via express mail or FAX delivery.
§ Many medical publishers make full-text articles available on their websites for free— either immediately, or within a period of months or a year after the publication date. These articles can be found readily through online searches (using, e.g., PubMed or Google). Many journals have adopted a code of practice whereby selected articles of immediate importance to clinical care are often made available free upon publication and widely publicized; in addition, many journals in biomedicine make articles available openly available within a year or so after publication, in accordance with their own business models. A growing number of biomedical publishers adhere to guidelines provided by the DC Principles for Free Access to Science (www.dcprinciples.org), which encourage wide dissemination of biomedical research by such voluntary measures.
§ Publishers participate in innovative licensing arrangements that have resulted in dramatically increased access to journal literature, not only in the United States, Europe, and Asia, but also for research and professional works in developing countries. One example of this is the HINARI project (http://www.healthinternetwork.org), in which publishers of medical journals are working with the World Health Organization to provide free access to approximately 2,000 core medical journals to research investigators in the worlds poorest nations, in order to bridge the digital divide and improve health care in the developing world. This project is being continually expanded.
§ Publishers have created new web-based services to offer both practitioners and healthcare consumers information that is designed to bring the most relevant research findings to their attention, to ensure best patient care. For example, Stanford University Libraries' HighWire Press (http://highwire.stanford.edu) offers a robust and stable platform that currently houses nearly 400 journals and supports over 1.8 million articles, including 750,000 that have been made freely available by leading biomedical publishers and medical societies. HighWire has also developed a number of archival solutions designed to ensure the integrity of its collection and has created a web portal called the Library of the Sciences & Medicine that allows for highly sophisticated searching across the content of all the HighWire hosted journals, plus all 14 million article records in MEDLINE. Other examples for professionals include MD Consult (http://www.mdconsult.com) and WebMD's Medscape (http://www.medscape.com/px/urlinfo).
WebMD also offers timely and credible information for the public on its website. Publishers also provide educational content and web links to their own publications in support of a diverse range of consumer-health web sites that are now offered by patient advocacy groups and volunteer healthcare organizations, hospitals and clinics, and pharmaceutical companies that provide medical information to professionals and healthcare consumers.
The cooperative and aggressive actions of publishers to improve access to the medical literature means that in contrast to the situation a decade ago, where access was limited to the hundreds or thousands of paper copies in circulation, tens of millions of researchers and physicians now have desktop access&and the latest advances in medical research are made available rapidly to the interested public through their libraries or the publishers themselves.