Yea for National Academies Press

The National Academies Press, the organization that publishes reports for the National Academies of Sciences, the Instutute of Medicine, and the National Research Council, announced last week that it is making all of its published reports freely downloadable to all. They used to provide free content in underdeveloped countries, but the policy change now makes their content free to everyone everywhere. This includes their current offerings plus all future reports published by the Press.

According to NAP's Executive Director, Barbara Kline Pope, "Our business model has evolved so that it is now financially viable to put this content out to the entire world for free. This is a wonderful opportunity to make a positive impact by more effectively sharing our knowledge and analyses." The free PDFs are available exclusively from the NAP’s website, http://www.nap.edu/

Happy National Library Week

That's right, all week this week, you'll find us librarians celebrating in the stacks. And those of us who don't have stacks will be feeling equally festive in front of our computer screens.

A recent blog post by CNN Librarian Kerith McFadden pointed out that librarians are not only heroic (example: Alia Muhammad Baker, the chief librarian of Basra, Iraq, who removed 30,000 books from the city's main library before it was destroyed during the 2003 invasion of Iraq), but also powerful. According to a character in Spider Robinson's "The Callahan Touch", one of "Librarians are the secret masters of the universe. They control information. Never piss one off."

Michael Moore adds this more ominous note, "I really didn't realize the librarians were, you know, such a dangerous group. ... You think they're just sitting at the desk, all quiet and everything. They're like plotting the revolution, man. I wouldn't mess with them"

So we'll carry on here with the celebrating. LOUD and PROUD as my friend and colleague Lauren Maggio, Clinical Librarian at Stanford's Lane Medical Library, suggested on the back of the above postcard she sent me. Thanks, Lauren. If you hadn't sent that card, the entire week might have gone by without celebration.

Visit Open Access Week

AND don't forget to visit our information table on Thursday, October 21st, 1-2 p.m., Bldg. 3, room 505. If the weather's nice, we may opt for the covered entrance in front of Carr Auditorium. We'll have cookies, stickers, pens, t-shirt giveaways, and, oh yes, information on why you should consider publishing in Open Access journals or, at the very least, depositing your postprints in OA archives such as the UC eScholarship repository

Podcast

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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.

Review of the iPad on Medical Rounds

For all you proud iPad owners: here's a physician's take on the practicality of using the device on patient rounds. According to him, the availability of wireless connectivity is crucial. What's your experience been on the wards here? Please comment.