On its 10th anniversary, PubMed Central (PMC) is one of the world's largest archives of freely accessible full-text journal articles. Its launch in February 2000 marked a major step toward providing greater access to the results of publicly funded research in biomedicine and the life sciences, and since April 2008 the NIH has required that articles reporting the results of NIH-funded research projects be deposited in PMC. This deposit mandate has met with intense opposition from many in the publishing industry, and it is the basis for two competing bills currently in legislation: one that would expand the mandate to other federal agencies and one that would overturn it.
Dr. Lipman leads the development team behind PMC. He is Director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI), a major R&D division of the National Library of Medicine within the NIH. He has overseen the NCBI’s growth into one of the most heavily used resources in the world for the search and retrieval of biomedical information. Among NCBI's approximately 100 databases are GenBank (DNA sequences), PubMed (abstracts and citations of published biomedical literature), PMC (full-text articles) and dbGaP (Genome-Wide Association Studies and other phenotype and genotype data).
This event is free and open to the public (please bring a picture ID to access the event). It is the fourth of six events this academic year in a speaker series organized by the Scholarly Communication Program. Follow the series remotely via Twitter at http://twitter.com/ScholarlyComm. Video will be distributed through the Program's website and Columbia University's iTunesU and YouTube pages. For information on the series, Research without Borders: The Changing World of Scholarly Communication, please email Kathryn Pope at kp2002@columbia.edu, or visit http://scholcomm.columbia.edu/events.