Open access
By Ruth SoRelle, M.P.H.
A new service provided through the Houston Academy of Medicine-Texas Medical Center Library seeks to create a "digital repository" of published medical articles, teaching materials, dissertations, theses and other learning resources developed by faculty and students at various TMC institutions.
The resource DigitalCommons@The Texas Medical Center (http://digitalcommons.library.tmc.edu/) is in its infancy, but Leah Krevit, M.L.I.S., associate director of collections management and director of this project at the library, has high hopes that it will become a readily available source of information for those in TMC institutions as well as members of the public. Its web site notes: "Making information openly accessible provides patients, families, health professionals, scientists, faculty and others with electronic access to research publications in a central archive that will be available for years to come.
Open access
The plan is a local example of what's becoming an international movement: open access to scientific information. Nobel laureate Harold Varmus, M.D., the former director of the National Institutes of Health and president and chief executive officer of Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center in New York, is its most visible proponent. His first attempts at getting the scientific and publishing communities to accept the idea of open access had limited success. Finally, he and a group of colleagues with similar enthusiasm for the free exchange of scientific ideas started the Public Library of Science (PLoS) (http://www.plos.org/index.php), "a nonprofit organization of scientists and physicians committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature a freely available public resource." The numbers of journals it publishes have grown: PLoS Biology, PLoS Medicine, PLoS Computational Biology, PLoS Genetics, PLoS Pathogens, PLoS Clinical Trials, PLoS ONE and the newest, PLoS Neglected Tropical Diseases. All of these are open to anyone who wants to read them.
The local repository is much more modest, but its aims are the same – to make information on biology, medicine and science freely available, both to the colleagues of researchers and physicians and to the public, which often funds such work through the National Institutes of Health and nongovernmental organizations to which they contribute.
More information available
More of the privately held journals, with readership limited by subscription costs, are making their contents available on a delayed basis – usually six months to a year after the scientific article is first published. Still others make at least one article freely available through the Web during each publication cycle.
It is a beginning to a movement fueled, at least in part, by the growing interest in the Internet. Think of what it means to researchers and physicians halfway around the globe, often in countries that lack the resources to subscribe to medical and scientific journals. They can log on and access the latest treatment and scientific information.
Think of what it means to patients, who have become increasingly savvy about their diseases. They can now access the actual science and read it for themselves. They may not understand it all, but it can help them separate hype from reality when they are considering treatment options.
Information is key
The free exchange of information is key. It helps researchers and it helps patients. Whether subscription-only journals will change their character is unknown at this time. More and more, they are being driven into online versions by the emphasis on the Internet. How we get our information is changing daily. It would be naïve to assume that the way scientists obtain their information and exchange would remain the same. The open access movement marks the start of a new era.
