Creating a Better Mousetrap! A Matter of Opinion

Creating A Better Moustrap!
A Matter of Opinion

As originally published in The Physiologist
Volume 45, Number 1, February 2002, page 3

On January 11th, HighWire Press, the producer of APS’ online journal sites, announced the launch of a new and better mousetrap for the scientific community. Named the HighWire Library of the Sciences and Medicine [from http://highwire.stanford.edu, click on the link to “Try the beta version”], the site is designed to address one of the major concerns of the proponents of E-Biomed and the Public Library of Science (http://www.public-libraryofscience.org). That is, the creation of a single site for digital scientific content deposition will provide enhanced searchability for all of Medline, plus the full text of 300 science journals.

In an earlier article (1), I indicated that it was the view of the proponents of E-Biomed and the Public Library of Science, that PubMed Central (http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov) would play this role. David Lipman, Director for the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), had been pushing the community of scholarly publishers to deposit their digital content into PubMed Central (PMC) for archiving and searching purposes. However, to do that, the APS and other publishers would have had to bear the cost of file conversion to meet the requirements set by NCBI. The digital content housed on the HighWire computers needed to be manipulated and transferred to NCBI for publication on PubMed Central. This was an unnecessary financial burden at a time when the proponents of the Public Library of Science (PLoS) were also telling non-profit scholarly publishers that the content should be given away. As a result of the disconnect between the desires of PLoS and the financial realities of publishing scientific journals online, very few publishers took PubMed Central up on their offer. To date, only five established journals have content posted on PubMed Central. An additional seven online journals are included on the site along with a number of journals published by BioMed Central (http://www.biomedcentral.com), a commercial publisher seeking to create new journals to compete with the existing scholarly journals.

Instead of transferring content from HighWire to PMC, at additional cost, the APS and many of the other scholarly publishers working with HighWire decided to build on the already enormous collection of scientific literature on the HighWire site by creating a web portal that provided the scientific community with enhanced searchability in one location. As expressed by many of the early proponents of E-Biomed, they wanted a site where the entirety of the scientific literature could be searched without encountering barriers caused by access restrictions. PubMed (and Medline) provides such a site, but much of the content is not posted for several weeks after publication, and contains full-text access to articles provided by only the few publishers participating in PMC.

HighWire put together a Portal Advisory Committee comprised of representatives from approximately 12 publishers, including the APS, to guide the development of the HighWire Public Library of the Sciences and Medicine. The new site offers users seamless, full-text access to nearly 300 highly cited journals, plus simultaneous, searchable access to all of Medline. In addition, the portal provides access to the world’s largest archive of free, peer-reviewed, full-text life sciences research with over 385,000 full-text articles. It should be noted that PMC has about 61,000 full text articles, an order of magnitude fewer full text articles for searching than HW has and a factor of six fewer free articles than is available through the HighWire portal.

The new HighWire site allows researchers to be more productive, focused and efficient in finding just the information they need. The new site has been enhanced to include 12 powerful new search features, advanced browsing capabilities, linguistic processing, and a four-color graphical TopicMap, which gives the researcher a sense of context while navigating HighWire’s new peer-reviewed taxonomy in a tree-structured topical database browser. Users of the site will have seamless access to both free and paid content and simplified management of content alerts.

“As scientists and publishers have debated the merits of making more of the literature free, researchers have told us what is important to the productivity and quality of their research: barrier-free access to more full-text content; easier, more comprehensive and more precise cross-journal searching; and subject-specific, personalized email alerts,” said John Sack, Director and Associate Publisher of HighWire press. “The new HighWire site is our publishers’ and HighWire Press’s specific response to researchers’ stated needs.” The APS is excited about being part of this joint venture.

The new site will provide researchers with access to nearly 300 leading full-text journals including 80 of the 200 most frequently cited life sciences journals in the world, including the APS journals, on the journals’ own sites. In addition, users will be able to use the site to search the entire content of Medline, with one-click access to the full text. It is also clear from the search results, which articles are free—over 350,000 currently are free—or which articles are accessible via a personal or institutional subscription.

In developing the site, the HighWire Portal Advisory Committee encouraged the inclusion of new subject-based browsing features in order to provide a way for researchers who are new to a field to browse articles, and for keyword-searchers to refine their searches by topic. The HighWire Library offers an enhanced CiteTrack feature, which provides automatic updating of citation references as new articles are published. Toll-Free Linking gives researchers the full-text of these cited references in any HighWire-based journal article. The HighWire Library also offers re-searchers a rich taxonomy with more than 22,000 topic categories in a detailed hierarchy developed by professional librarians, with discipline-by-discipline peer review underway by leading researchers. Nearly 12 million articles have been categorized with almost a quarter of a billion topic entries.

The scientific community has asked for a better way to perform its literature searching and APS, in conjunction with HighWire Press and 100 other non-profit publishers, has responded. The HighWire Library of the Sciences and Medicine is the better mousetrap that the community has requested. Don’t be the one asking, “Who stole my cheese?”—use the HighWire Library of the Sciences and Medicine to keep track of it!

Martin Frank
1. Frank, M. No Free Lunch. The Physiologist 44: 109, 2001

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