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BMJ set to sign with PubMed Central, JSTOR, and WorldSpace

Tony Delamothe BMJ

Within the next few weeks, the BMJ expects to join three separate 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 everyone 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 integrated 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 related editorials, commentaries, and rapid responses and to print out copies of the article that look like those in the paper 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 and improving access to those journals via the worldwide web." 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. This year it begins its general science collection with the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society (1665 to current articles), Science, and the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences.

The electronic versions are created at no costs to the journals; 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).

The radio signals can contain media rich material—such as what now appears on the world wide web. For many parts of the developing world, this may offer a better short term option than the internet. Three geostationary satellites will provide broadcast coverage to Africa, Central and South America, and Asia—a population of 4.8 billion people.

Although WorldSpace is a commercial company, it has set aside 5% of the satellite's capacity for good works. Chief among these is the Public Health Channel, which will include the University of Pittsburgh's course on epidemiology for medical and health related students (http://www.pitt.edu/~super1/) as well as the BMJ's current issue.