AFRO-NETS> British Medical Journal set to sign with PubMed Central ...

[Dieter Neuvians MD <neuvians@harare.iafrica.com>]

British Medical Journal set to sign with PubMed Central ...
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http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/320/7226/8

BMJ 2000; 320:8 (1 January)
Tony Delamothe, BMJ 

Within the next few weeks, the BMJ expects to join three sepa-
rate initiatives, which together will make more of the journal 
available to many more people. It will be the first general 
medical journal to join PubMed Central, a project masterminded 
by the US National Institutes of Health to make the results of 
original research in the life sciences freely available to eve-
ryone via the internet (BMJ 1999; 318:1637-8). 

Electronic versions of research articles will be transferred to 
the National Institutes of Health at the same time as they are 
published on the BMJ's website. PubMed Central will be inte-
grated with PubMed, Medline's electronic interface. Researchers 
will be able to access the full text of studies either from 
PubMed Central or by following links back to the BMJ's website. 

As now, users will need to visit the journal's website for re-
lated editorials, commentaries, and rapid responses and to 
print out copies of the article that look like those in the pa-
per journal.

The BMJ is set to inaugurate the medical collection of JSTOR, 
whose goal is "to benefit all parties in the field of scholarly 
communication by providing centralised storage and archiving of 
important journals in electronic form." In the BMJ's case, this 
means digitising all the journals between 1840 and December 
1993 (when the BMJ's own online archive begins). 

JSTOR, a not-for-profit organisation set up by the Andrew W 
Mellon Foundation in 1995, has already assembled a collection 
of 117 journals in the humanities and social sciences. 

The electronic versions are created at no costs to the jour-
nals; revenue comes from library subscribers currently nearly 
500 worldwide. 

By contrast, WorldSpace wants to make the most recent issue of 
the BMJ freely available to health professionals responsible 
for the health care of the world's most disadvantaged people. 

The company was founded "to provide direct satellite delivery 
of digital audio communications and multimedia services to the 
emerging world" and depends on satellites to deliver signals to 
portable receivers (costing about ?150 ($250) each). 

Although WorldSpace is a commercial company, it has set aside 
5% of the satellite's capacity for good works.

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