“PMC Canada is a powerful tool that will help researchers build upon one another’s work and speed up the discovery and innovation process to address important health challenges,” says Dr. Ian Graham, Vice-President of Knowledge Translation at CIHR. “It will provide quick and easy access to a much broader audience, increasing the value and application of CIHR-funded research.”
PMC Canada builds on the successful PubMed Central (PMC) archive developed by the US National Library of Medicine and will join UK PubMed Central (UKPMC) as a member of the broader PMC International network. This network enables national versions of PMC to share content, and will make much of PubMed Central and UKPMC content accessible through PMC Canada.
The initial release of PMC Canada, to be available in fall 2009, will include a basic bilingual interface, a manuscript submission system for CIHR researchers and a bilingual help desk. An advisory committee of Canadian health researchers and other stakeholders will guide PMC Canada’s future development.
What Canada needs is not yet another central repository, but more mandates by institutions (and funders) for their employees (and fundees) to deposit directly in their own institutional repositories (the universal providers of all research, funded and unfunded, across all subjects, biomedical or otherwise). The institutional deposits can then be harvested into whatever subject-specific central collections one wishes to create. Mandating direct central deposit simply makes funder mandates compete with institutional mandates, at the cost of needlessly slowing and handicapping instead of facilitating and accelerating progress toward universal Open Access to all research, funded and unfunded, across all subjects, biomedical or otherwise: http://bit.ly/ECAuA
The value of PubMed Central (PMC) is great and indisputable. That is not what is at issue. What is at issue is (1) WHERE TO DEPOSIT (should researchers be mandated to deposit directly in PMC or in their own institution’s repository, from which PMC — and other central services — can harvest?) and (2) WHO SHOULD DEPOSIT (the author or the publisher?).
The links I provided above in — http://bit.ly/ECAuA — explain the reasons why (1) the locus of deposit for both funder and institutional mandates should be the institutional repository and not PMC or any other central service and the reasons why (2) deposit should be done by the mandatee author, and not a third party, such as a publisher. The reasons discussed are very specific and matter a great deal for the practical success and effectiveness of OA mandates. They deserve to be reflected upon in order to ensure that funder and institutional policies are compatible, coherent, and can systematically scale globally.