Open access ensures effective information retrieval of medical literature in e-databases Jain N C - Indian J Community Med

Use the link to access the full text editorial from the Indian Journal of Community Medicine published by the Indian Association of Preventive and Social Medicine.  The article opens as follows: "Scientific information is both a researcher's greatest output and technological innovation's most important resource. The rising cost of journal subscription is a major force behind the emergence of the open access (OA) movement. The emergence of digitization and Internet has increased the possibility of making information available to anyone, anywhere, anytime, and in any format. The major benefits of OA include: Researchers and students gain increased access to knowledge, publications receive greater visibility and readership, the potential impact of research is heightened, increased access to and sharing of knowledge leads to opportunities for equitable economic and social development, intercultural dialogue, and has the potential to spark innovation. OA improves the speed, efficiency, and efficacy of research as also OA enables computation upon the research literature. [1] With this backdrop, it is heartening to note that biomedical scientists are increasingly gaining access to medical literature for a variety of assignments like writing a research paper or a research proposal or even staying current with advances in biomedical field. Thanks to OA, a number of sources are now available in the biomedical field apart from PubMed ( http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed ), which provides free access to the largest biomedical resource available and is updated daily. Specifically, PubMed listed 5,645 journals (as on January 1, 2013) indexed from various countries. [2] A total of 42 (0.74 %) journals are included from India (also as on January 1, 2013). [3] Encouragingly, the national initiative by the Indian Council of Medical Research (ICMR) funded project, 'National database of Indian medical journals' by the National Informatics Centre Services Inc. (NICSI), New Delhi, provides among others, a bibliographic database of about 100 prominent peer - reviewed Indian biomedical journals indexed from 1985 onwards through indMED ( http://indmed.nic.in/, accessed on January1, 2013) as also full text of 63 Indian biomedical journals (medIND). [4] It supplements international indexing services like PubMed. It simply means one gets 45,928 records using 'contraception' as the key word in PubMed, while another exclusive 170 Indian records using 'contraception' as the key word in indMED ..."