One important driver for expanding access to research literature is for patients to have the opportunity to learn about the latest research surrounding their afflictions and treatment. Even though the majority of medical research articles would be difficult for most people to fully comprehend, a stricken patient or concerned caregiver may be anxious to search for—and possibly study—the literature concerning the latest research developments or newly proposed treatment protocols.
At this week’s Frankfurt Book Fair, a group of six medical publishers and three major scholarly publishing organizations will launch an initiative to provide such access: patientACCESS, a web portal for patients and caregivers to access the latest peer-reviewed medical journal articles for a nominal handling fee.
Two scholarly publishing associations, the Professional/Scholarly Publishing Division of the Association of American Publishers (PSP/AAP) and the International Association of Scientific, Technical & Medical Publishers (STM), are driving the collaboration with essential technical infrastructure provided by the Copyright Clearance Center (CCC).
For members of the public, web searches of scholarly research literature are performed using commercial search engines, such as Google, Yahoo, or Bing. Upon identifying an article of interest, a person without a subscription would typically see the article’s abstract with an option to pay a per-article fee to view the entire article. The patientACCESS service, however, gives patients and caregivers the option for full and immediate access to the article on the publisher’s platform and provides links to additional resources that may be of interest to patients, such as NIH’s PubMed Central and WebMD.
Through patientACCESS, an individual can self-declare as a patient or caregiver and receive electronic copies of medical science articles from these six publishers for personal use or for sharing with a medical professional. Handling fees vary by publisher, but they are nominal—in the range of the price of a cup of coffee. The program, which is being promoted by the nine participating organizations, will test how such a system works for both the users and the publishers. Now that the pilot phase has concluded, this launch into full production allows for further refinement and is expected to evolve into a more complete system that can be scaled to a larger number of participating publishers with their relevant journals.
The six participating publishers, which include the American Association for Cancer Research, American Society of Clinical Oncology, Elsevier, SAGE, Wolters Kluwer, and Wiley, are providing access to approximately 440 journals that span a large number of medical subjects and disciplines. CCC, an organization well known to the scholarly publishing and library communities, provides the infrastructure that offers the reader a simple online transaction service for access to and downloading of articles from designated journals.
I am very pleased to have helped to organize patientACCESS and acknowledge the efforts of Jayne Marks (Wolters Kluwer), Richard Gedye (STM), John Tagler (PSP), and Susan Kesner (CCC) for their hard work in getting this program off the ground. In my view, patientACCESS is a notable complement to other scholarly journal public access initiatives being provided by the publishing community, such as patientINFORM, CHORUS, and a variety of nominal-cost article rental programs, such as DeepDyve and Pubget. These programs all recognize that there is a cost for managing the review, production, dissemination, and archiving of peer-reviewed scholarly journals and provide reasonable alternatives for either immediate or delayed access for the general reader. With this latest service, patientACCESS adds another dimension by delivering public access to those who perhaps have the most at stake. Publishers are well positioned to make headway on public access and continue to invest in technologies and engage in collaborations to make that happen.