Informationsplattform Open Access: Medicine

Medicine

In this section we have compiled information on Open Access (OA) in the field of medicine. If you have any comments or suggestions on this topic, please do not hesitate to send us an E-mail.

 

General information on Open Access in medicine

Thanks to the activities of OA medical journal publishers and to several fact databases which are indispensable to research, Open Access is now firmly established in this field.

 

Promotion of Open Access by organisations and scientific societies

The U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) and the National Library of Medicine (NLM) play an active role in promoting Open Access – both by operating OA databases and repositories and by requiring that the results of the research that they fund be made openly accessible to the public.

There are many different scientific societies in the field of medicine. As a result of this fragmentation, these societies have not played a leading role in the OA debate up to now.

 

Open Access medical publishers

The Public Library of Science (PloS) is a non-profit OA publisher which was co-founded in 2001 by the medicine Nobel Laureate and former director of the National Institutes of Health (NIH) Harold Varmus with the aim of producing high-quality OA journals comparable with Science and Nature. The first journal, PLoS Biology, was launched in October 2003; it was followed in 2004 by PLoS Medicine. The impressive Impact Factors of these journals (for 2007,13.5 and 12.6 respectively) are an indication of their high scientific quality. PLoS currently has seven journals, five of which are already covered by the Science Citation Index (SCI). While the two most recently launched journals are not yet indexed by SCI, they are, however, tracked by other indexing databases.

PLoS journals are financed in part by publication fees which range from $1,300 to $2,850 per article. Authors who are affiliated to one of PLOS' institutional members are eligible for a discount of this fee. In December 2002, PLoS received a grant of $9m in seed capital from the Moore Foundation to finance the launch of OA publishing operations.

BioMed Central, an independent British OA publisher established in 1998, has a portfolio of 189 OA journals (as of September 2008). Already 41 BioMed Central journals have an official Impact Factor, and, for 2007, unofficial Impact Factors have been calculated for 85 others. Like PLoS, BioMed Central's business model is based on article-processing charges (APCs). These range from $175 to $2,375 per article. If the submitting author's organisation is a full member of BioMed Central, the APC is generally covered by membership. In the case of supporter members, a discounted APC is payable. As of June 2008, the membership list featured some 319 institutions – mostly universities.

 

German Medical Science is a portal for OA journals which was launched in 2003 as a collaborative project of the Association of the Scientific Medical Societies in Germany, the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED) and the German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI). At present, 13 OA periodicals are published under the umbrella of the German Medical Science portal (as of September 2008), including the journal of the same name, GMS – German Medical Science – an Interdisciplinary Journal, which covers all fields of medicine. In addition, the portal publishes the reports (abstracts and full texts) of approximately 15 congresses each year and the series HTA Reports. While each participating medical society is responsible for its own editing and peer-reviewing, the German National Library of Medicine (ZB MED) provides organisational and editorial support and the German Institute of Medical Documentation and Information (DIMDI) makes the necessary technical infrastructure available. The journals are financed via membership fees paid by the scholarly societies which use the publication platform and via donations. The ZB MED is a cooperation partner of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM).

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Open Access journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals features between 450 and 500 OA journals in the categories Biology and Life Sciences and Health Sciences. This figure far exceeds that for the STM subjects informatics or physics. The website Free Medical Journals is another source of information on medical journals.

While in other fields OA journals with high impact factors are quite rare, there is an impressive number of OA medical journals with high or sometimes outstanding ratings.

Selection

The following journals are sorted by Journal Impact Factor compiled from the online edition of the Journal Citation Reports (Copyright 2008).

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Subject-based repositories

Repositories

To date there are not many subject-based repositories for medical preprints or postprints.

Databases

See also Open Access to data

  • PubMed:
    The PubMed database of the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) is the Web version of the MEDLINE database and features links to the full-text articles and to numerous other databases. MEDLINE covers approximately 5,000 biomedical journals and contains some 14 million citations.
  • Human Genome Project:
    This publicly-funded international research project was launched in the USA in October 1990. At the outset, some 1,000 scientists from 40 countries participated in the programme. Project goals were to identify and sequence human DNA. The project was originally planned to last 15 years but reached its goals by 2003.
  • GenBank:
    The GenBank is a database of the U.S. National Institutes of Health (NIH) which contains all publicly accessible DNA sequences.
  • The Virtual Library of Biology vifabio provides fast access to approximately 400 online biological databases.
  • Biomedical Engineering:
    An annotated list of ten other openly-accessible databases from agricultural sciences to protein research can be found on this City College of New York (CCNY) Libraries webpage under the sub-heading Open Access Databases (use the browser's search function).
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Member of the open-access.net Scientific Advisory Board from the field of medicine

Prof. Dr. Hans Reinauer – Past President of the Association of Scientific Medical Societies in Germany (AWMF), Editor-in-Chief German Medical Science

 

Other board members

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