PubMed Central: The GenBank of the published literature

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Abstract
In 1999, Harold Varmus, then Director of the National Institutes of Health, proposed a bold new initiative called PubMed Central (PMC) designed to provide a central repository for literature in the life sciences [see Marshall, E. (1999) Science 284, 718]. Following an initial period of confusion, PMC now exists. It has a clear mission, a stable home, and a nucleus of papers. Its mission is to provide a comprehensive electronic archive of the peer-reviewed literature relevant to the biological sciences. Its home is the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), whose director is David Lipman. NCBI is also home to GenBank, the public archive of DNA sequences. The publications already present in PMC and freely accessible to the world's scientific community include all articles published in PNAS that are more than 1 month old and that were in a suitable electronic format, as well as articles from a number of other journals such as Molecular Biology of the Cell, Arthritis Research, and Breast Cancer Research. Several other journals, including The British Medical Journal (BMJ) and Nucleic Acids Research (NAR), are committed to join. A full list is available at www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov. PMC will contain only articles from the peer-reviewed literature and is not intended to be the sole repository or distributor of the publications that it hosts. In fact, journals are encouraged to distribute their material as widely as possible, through their own web sites or online distributors. Furthermore, publishers do not need to relinquish their normal copyright provisions for the further commercial use of the material. The great value that PMC brings …

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