As you know, Medline is by far and away the most important abstracting and indexing service in the life sciences and most researchers access Medline through PubMed. If you find a paper through PubMed and that paper is available electronically you get a link through to the publisher's site with the full-text (that you can follow only if you have access rights). For example, see:
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/ query.fcgi?cmd=3DRetrieve&db=3DPubMed&list_uids=3D11857108&dopt=3DAbstract= It struck me that it would encourage life sciences authors to self-archive if there was also a link from the PubMed record to the self-archived version of the paper. It should be possible to use the 'link out' feature to add the authors' version to the record (see http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/linkout/). It might even be possible to provide an icon on the main record page next to the link to the publisher's version. I wondered if any repositories are already offering this service to authors i.e., if an author deposits their version in the local repository the repository will make the PubMed link? This could be a powerful tool for encouraging the life scientist as they know that their version will be accessed by anybody who does not have access to the publisher's version. (Apologies for cross-posting.) David C Prosser PhD Director SPARCEurope E-mail:[email protected] Tel: 44 (0) 1865 284 451 Mobile:+44 (0) 7974 673 888 http://www.sparceurope.org
