Why is PubMed Central needed when many publishers already make their journals freely available on the web within a year of publication?
PubMed Central exists for two reasons, both of which arise from NLM’s Congressional mandate: 1) to permanently preserve digital journal literature in the life sciences, and 2) to improve access to biomedical information for health professionals, researchers and the public. PMC gathers the content from its diverse journal sources into a single repository, where it is stored in a uniform and well defined structured format, the NLM Journal Archiving and Interchange XML DTD. At the same time that PMC clearly maintains the identity of each journal, it also displays articles in a uniform style for users. PMC’s common archival format makes it easier to work with the material and extend its utility in efficient ways, using computational techniques. It allows greater integration of the literature with related resources, such as the variety of databases available in NCBI’s Entrez system. New features can be applied consistently across the collection in a scalable manner. Once a technique has bee
Related Questions
- Why is PubMed Central needed when many publishers already make their journals freely available on the web within a year of publication?
- What is the significance of Web of Science or PubMed reference numbers when submitting publication details?
- Will the current issues of participating journals be freely available through PubMed Central (PMC)?
