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Farmer's Markets at Hospitals

There's a story in the New York Times this morning about Preston Maring, an Oakland Ob/Gyn physician who's influencing his organization's food environment by establishing farmer's markets in and around Kaiser medical centers. Check out his blog

PubMed...Half Full or Half Empty?

PubMed, the National Library of Medicine's interface to Medline, recently announced proudly that it just added the 20 MILLIONTH citation to its database. It's considered to be the world's largest and probably most important strictly biomedical database, although there are other databases that are larger in scope that contain more records. What's interesting to me is not the size of the database, but the fact that 3 million of those citations have full text connected with them, a fact that was buried in the second paragraph of the announcement.

This could be seen as a glass-half-full or glass-half-empty situation, although I choose to see it as a half-full glass, or to be more precise, a .15 full glass, probably because I remember the days when there was zero full text connected to PubMed, and even the days when there was no PubMed.

Obviously, the Open Access movement has a long way to go, that is, .85 of the full glass. I don't want to put publishers out of business, but I do think something needs to change in their business models in order to facilitate scientific information discoverability and collaboration. Technology has provided the means for access, and the time is ripe for a scholarly publishing paradigm shift. Next time you're wondering what journal to publish your scientific paper in consider Biomed Central journals. Let's get that glass filled up.