BMJ/Stanford Pre-Empts E-Biomed?

From: Ransdell, Joseph M. <ransdell_at_DOOR.NET>
Date: Wed, 30 Jun 1999 17:14:53 -0500

An article in today's Chronicle of Higher Education begins:

<<quote>>
     While the National Institutes of Health continues to debate the
idea of establishing a World-Wide Web site for biomedical research, a
British medical journal and the Stanford University Libraries say they
will open a similar site this fall.

     The site will be a searchable electronic archive devoted to
clinical medicine and health research. Authors will be able to post
articles that have not been accepted for publication or subjected to
peer review.

     Officials of the journal, the BMJ, say the site is designed to
break the hammerlock that journal publishers have on the dissemination
of scholarly information. And by allowing authors to publish electronic
versions of their journal preprints -- articles that have not been
formally published -- the new "e-print" server could also help get
important new research into the public domain more quickly, the editors
say.
<<end quote>>

It ends as follows:

<<quote>>
 Stanford is pursuing plans to create additional e-print servers in
other fields, such as cellular and molecular biology.
<<end quote>>

I would quote more except the Chronicle seems to be getting increasingly
uptight about copyright recently! It contains some of the usual pro and
con, but is worth reading nonetheless. The BMJ/Stanford archive is said
to be free, presumably meaning for deposit and retrieval alike since it
is said to be modeled on the LANL server. It is for unrefereed papers
only and "will not be designed to accommodate on-line peer review, but
will include features allowing readers to record their comments about
posted articles. " Thus it differs from E-biomed in that respect since
the latter is, at present at least, designed for acceptance of both
unreviewed and peer approved papers.

The address for the Chronicle article is:

http://chronicle.com/free/99/06/99063001t.htm

A more informative article, though, might be one at the BMJ website that
compares the BMJ/Stanford plan with the E-biomed plan. (I have only had
time to skim it.) The URL for this one is:

http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/318/7199/1637


--
Joseph Ransdell  <ransdell_at_door.net> or <bnjmr_at_ttu.edu>
Dept of Philosophy   Texas Tech Univ.  Lubbock TX 79409
(806)  742-3158 office    797-2592 home    742-0730 fax
ARISBE:Peirce Telecommunity  http://www.door.net/arisbe
   http://www.door.net/arisbe/homepage/ransdell.htm
Received on Wed Feb 10 1999 - 19:17:43 GMT

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