PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada) was a Canadian national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature. [1] It operated from 2010 to 2018. It joined Europe PubMed Central (formerly UK PubMed Central) as a member of the PubMed Central International network. [2] PMC Canada was a partnership between the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), the Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI, the Canadian National Science Library), and the United States National Library of Medicine (NLM). [3]
PMC Canada included an interface in both English and French, to support the use of Canada's two official languages. PubMed Central Canada provided free access to content, and was one of the locations where CIHR researchers could deposit their peer-reviewed research articles, in order to meet with the open-access requirements of the CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs. [4]
The initial version of PubMed Central Canada launched in October 2009. The launch was timed to coincide with Open Access Week. The full launch of PMC Canada, including a manuscript submission system for CIHR researchers, was April 28, 2010. [5]
On February 23, 2018, PubMed Central Canada (PMC Canada) was taken offline permanently. [6] No author manuscripts were deleted, and the approximately 2,900 manuscripts authored by researchers funded by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) in the archive were copied to the National Research Council's Digital Repository over the coming months. These manuscripts along with all other content will also remain publicly searchable on PubMed Central and Europe PubMed Central, meaning such manuscripts will continue to be compliant with the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications. [7]
In academic publishing, a preprint is a version of a scholarly or scientific paper that precedes formal peer review and publication in a peer-reviewed scholarly or scientific journal. The preprint may be available, often as a non-typeset version available free, before or after a paper is published in a journal.
MEDLINE is a bibliographic database of life sciences and biomedical information. It includes bibliographic information for articles from academic journals covering medicine, nursing, pharmacy, dentistry, veterinary medicine, and health care. MEDLINE also covers much of the literature in biology and biochemistry, as well as fields such as molecular evolution.
Open access (OA) is a set of principles and a range of practices through which research outputs are distributed online, free of access charges or other barriers. With open access strictly defined, or libre open access, barriers to copying or reuse are also reduced or removed by applying an open license for copyright.
The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM), operated by the United States federal government, is the world's largest medical library.
BioMed Central (BMC) is a United Kingdom-based, for-profit scientific open access publisher that produces over 250 scientific journals. All its journals are published online only. BioMed Central describes itself as the first and largest open access science publisher. It was founded in 2000 and has been owned by Springer, now Springer Nature, since 2008.
PubMed is a free search engine accessing primarily the MEDLINE database of references and abstracts on life sciences and biomedical topics. The United States National Library of Medicine (NLM) at the National Institutes of Health maintain the database as part of the Entrez system of information retrieval.
The Canadian Institutes of Health Research is a federal agency responsible for funding health and medical research in Canada. Comprising 13 institutes, it is the successor to the Medical Research Council of Canada.
A health or medical library is designed to assist physicians, health professionals, students, patients, consumers, medical researchers, and information specialists in finding health and scientific information to improve, update, assess, or evaluate health care. Medical libraries are typically found in hospitals, medical schools, private industry, and in medical or health associations. A typical health or medical library has access to MEDLINE, a range of electronic resources, print and digital journal collections, and print reference books. The influence of open access (OA) and free searching via Google and PubMed has a major impact on the way medical libraries operate.
PubMed Central (PMC) is a free digital repository that archives open access full-text scholarly articles that have been published in biomedical and life sciences journals. As one of the major research databases developed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), PubMed Central is more than a document repository. Submissions to PMC are indexed and formatted for enhanced metadata, medical ontology, and unique identifiers which enrich the XML structured data for each article. Content within PMC can be linked to other NCBI databases and accessed via Entrez search and retrieval systems, further enhancing the public's ability to discover, read and build upon its biomedical knowledge.
David J. Lipman is an American biologist who from 1989 to 2017 was the director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health. NCBI is the home of GenBank, the U.S. node of the International Sequence Database Consortium, and PubMed, one of the most heavily used sites in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. Lipman is one of the original authors of the BLAST sequence alignment program, and a respected figure in bioinformatics. In 2017, he left NCBI and became Chief Science Officer at Impossible Foods.
Europe PubMed Central is an open-access repository that contains millions of biomedical research works. It was known as UK PubMed Central until 1 November 2012.
An open-access mandate is a policy adopted by a research institution, research funder, or government which requires or recommends researchers—usually university faculty or research staff and/or research grant recipients—to make their published, peer-reviewed journal articles and conference papers open access (1) by self-archiving their final, peer-reviewed drafts in a freely accessible institutional repository or disciplinary repository or (2) by publishing them in an open-access journal or both.
The NIH Public Access Policy is an open access mandate, drafted in 2004 and mandated in 2008, requiring that research papers describing research funded by the National Institutes of Health must be available to the public free through PubMed Central within 12 months of publication. PubMed Central is the self-archiving repository in which authors or their publishers deposit their publications. Copyright is retained by the usual holders, but authors may submit papers with one of the Creative Commons licenses.
The Journal Article Tag Suite (JATS) is an XML format used to describe scientific literature published online. It is a technical standard developed by the National Information Standards Organization (NISO) and approved by the American National Standards Institute with the code Z39.96-2012.
Canada introduced the Tri-Agency Open Access Policy on Publications in May 2015 to mandate open access to research articles funded by Canada's three major research agencies: the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC), the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (SSHRC) and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR). CIHR has had an open access policy since 2008 and the new Tri-Agency policy is largely based on CIHR's pre-existing policy.
GigaScience is a peer-reviewed scientific journal that was established in 2012. It covers research and large data-sets that result from work in the biomedical and life sciences. The editor-in-chief is Scott Edmunds. Originally, the journal was co-published by BioMed Central and the Beijing Genomics Institute (BGI). In 2016, it left BioMed Central to form a new partnership between the GigaScience Press department of BGI and Oxford University Press. In 2018, GigaScience won the Association of American Publishers' PROSE Award for Innovation in journal publishing in the multidisciplinary category.
The following is a timeline of the international movement for open access to scholarly communication.
In Canada the Institutes of Health Research effected a policy of open access in 2008, which in 2015 expanded to include the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council and Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council. The Public Knowledge Project began in 1998 at University of British Columbia. Notable Canadian advocates for open access include Leslie Chan, Jean-Claude Guédon, Stevan Harnad, Heather Morrison, and John Willinsky.
The idea and practise of providing free online access to journal articles began at least a decade before the term "open access" was formally coined. Computer scientists had been self-archiving in anonymous ftp archives since the 1970s and physicists had been self-archiving in arXiv since the 1990s. The Subversive Proposal to generalize the practice was posted in 1994.
International Journal of Population Data Science, also known as IJPDS, is a peer-reviewed open-access journal publishing original research on issues in population data science and administrative data linkage to advance population study across health, education, environment and other domains. It was established in 2017 in partnership with the International Population Data Linkage Network (IPDLN).