[Music playing] PubMed Central-it is a great accomplishment.
I must say it makes me proud of everyone at NCBI.
This is a celebration of the 10th anniversary of PubMed Central...a success story unto itself-
from its founders to its collaborators, to its public advocates-it is truly a story
of achievement in science. To those of us who were on the front lines
a little over ten years ago when PubMed Central was just a contentious idea
and a small band of rebels were trying to change the way that scientists funded by the
NIH did their business and publicized their work and shared it with
others-the changes that have occurred over the last ten years seem truly phenomenal.
In the last ten years PubMed Central has become one of the essential tools of the life sciences.
It gets millions of people using it and it is an essential resource for biomedical scientists.
It really truly does accelerate the pace of scientific discovery and fuel this kind of
innovation that we all want to have and contribute directly
back to the public good. It begins in 1998, at a San Francisco bakery
called "Tassajara"-where, over a cup of coffee,
then NIH director Harold Varmus, meets with Stanford University biologist Pat Brown.
Brown describes how a Los Alamos physicist, Paul Ginsparg, and his colleagues are using
the internet to share their pre-published work.
Not long after that, the vision of an internet-based system, for the distribution and storage of
biomedical research articles, begins to take shape.
What was exposed very quickly was just how un-ambitious my own efforts were...
when it was taken over by these guys they just did an extraordinary job of integrating
text databases. It is simply called "E-Biomed"....and, in
December of that year, scientists at the Banbury Center Genome Project Workshop,
at Cold Spring Harbor Laboratories-embrace the concept of a global knowledge network
system like "E-biomed". Then, under the leadership of NCBI'­s director,
David Lipman, "E-Biomed" undergoes a name-change...to "PubMed Central"
The richest information about biological function right now is really in the literature.
It'­s not in specialized databases, it'­s not in some sort of mathematical frame work
like quantum mechanics, it'­s in the papers that biologists are writing,
and the easiest way to learn about that is to read the papers.
PubMed Central debuts with two prestigious journals -- The Proceedings of the National
Academy of Sciences -- and Molecular Biology of the Cell
In launching PubMed Central in 2000, NIH aimed to follow the successful example of the Human
Genome Project and promote scientific discovery by taking
advantage of opportunities created by information technology and the internet.
Development of a digital archive of biomedical journal articles was seen as a way to improve
access to cutting-edge research and to provide a long-term, stable repository
of the scientific literature
that researchers could continue to draw on
in their work, recognizing the cumulative nature of science.
Nobel Prize winner, Sir Richard Roberts, dubs PMC "the Genbank of published literature".
This is the value of something like PubMed Central. If you want to know what is the current
state of what is going on; whether you are a scientist or whether you
are a lay person, or you are a kid doing a high school science project
you have access to the literature, you can see what is going on,
you can find out where the cutting edge is, you can know what is going on.
At the same time, in 2000, Vitek Tracz launches "Biomed Central"...a European publishing
organization, offering a host of "open access" titles
that become part of PubMed Central. And by the summer of '01, PMC gets a further
boost as notable publishers such as: The European Molecular Biology Organization,
Cold Spring Harbor, and The American Society for Micro-Biology...
present their journals, for the rapidly growing archive.
At the same time, Varmus, Brown and a young computational biologist from UC Berkeley named
Michael Eisen begin their effort to create an online, open
access publishing organization that they call "The Public Library of Science."
Their objective is to produce high-quality, high impact journals-that will also demonstrate
the benefits of open access publishing. By 2002-2003 NCBI, and the PMC team leaders,
amass considerable experience in building and operating a digital repository
for journal articles. And a highlight of that effort is the establishment
of a structured digital format-for representing journal articles-
known as the "NLM-DTD". Developed by Jeff Beck, at NCBI, the format is now utilized
by the Library of Congress, the British Library, and numerous publishers submitting incoming
data to PubMed Central. In 2003 and 2004, at the urging of the PubMed
Central National Advisory Committee, NCBI and the NLM Library Operations staff-embark
on a major "back issue digitization" program. And more than 100 libraries donate their journal
copies. There is also strong support from the U.K.'­s
Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee.
They funded a good half of the project and Robert Kiley and his staff went out and sought
publishers to contribute to PubMed Central, and they got some worthy journals.
The Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine which we ended up scanning back 191 years.
With the older journals - both US and British - there is a wealth of significant biomedical
literature. Past medical observations and epidemiological
records have proven to be invaluable in providing insights into modern diseases.
Why is the Wellcome Trust so supportive of Pub Med Central? Well for the very obvious
reason really that a piece of research isn'­t finished until
it is published. And we want to make sure that the results of the research
that we fund are available to as many people as possible.
And that is what PubMed Central has achieved in a fantastically successful way.
With growing interest in open access, in 2005 PubMed Central becomes international collaborating
with the U.K. and, later, Canada. The degree of cooperation between PubMed Central
and UK PubMed Central for example has proven that two groups of people in two countries
can really work together in a way that benefits both groups of scientists, educators and researchers
in both countries and actually synergizes in a way that each
benefits from the other. I think that that degree of cooperation between
UK PubMed Central and PubMed Central here is really a model of how the open access movement
can spread worldwide. In addition, by 2005 it is also clear that
the stars have begun to align in favor of public access.
With Congressional interest stirring, the NIH officially initiates a policy requesting
that recipients of NIH funding deposit a copy of
their peer-reviewed manuscripts in PubMed Central.
Most members of the public and most Legislators, I think initially think, well, of course
this stuff is available to the public -- and they are actually surprised to learn that
it isn'­t. When the NIH "voluntary policy" meets with
tepid compliance, the U.S. Congress steps-in, and with the strong support of House Appropriations
Committee Chairman David Obey, the policy becomes mandatory.
And we hope that our recent requirement that NIH-funded research be made available
through NCBI, will get even more information out there to enhance the discovery process
and the public health. This had a dramatic effect on compliance.
Of the 88,000 NIH-funded articles published in 2009,
70% have been submitted to PubMed Central, and that figure continues to grow.
We wanted it to be very fast. It only takes about ten minutes for authors to submit files
to us and have it accepted into the system. Remarkably, in little more than a decade,
what begins as a coffee-chat topic between two notable scientists
evolves into a viable digital repository offering free availability of an increasingly
large body of biomedical and life sciences literature.
But to look at PMC as just a repository for scientific articles is to miss the bigger
picture. PMC is an integral part of a larger information
infrastructure that is accelerating discovery. Articles in PMC are entry points into a vast
body of biomedical information maintained by NCBI and NLM.
Interpreting these data requires access to the knowledge that is embodied in scientific
articles. Despite this progress the story is not over.
The desire for access to the medical literature is stronger than ever,
whether it comes from the biomedical researchers, health practitioners, medical educators, or
the general public. The fact that all the content in PubMed Central
is fully crawlable and indexed by tours like Google means that you and I, our families,
can go onto PubMed Central, go on to Google and find highly relevant resources
which make us more informed consumers for healthcare matters.
So what does this success story look like in the years to come?
Increasingly science is becoming multidisciplinary. So I am looking ten years from now
to see something that is very much broader, very much larger
probably with even better data resources associated with it than PMC currently has.
If you want to be a young scientist just entering the field
you will have so many more resources available to you in 10 years, than you have now.
PubMed Central changed everything-this is the demonstration of the way you can optimize
doing science in a digital environment. Eventually I think all scientific literature,
certainly all federally funded scientific research will be made immediately available
with no embargo period, on-line, it will be fully searchable, fully accessible.
This will happen I hope and believe in the not too distant future.
I think that because of all the exciting new devices you have you are going to expect you
can just reach into your pocket and pull something out and have access to
almost anything that has been published with a basis of taxpayer dollars.
We are delighted to work in partnership with PubMed Central, to have established UK PubMed
Central, which is now undergoing a European expansion
as other European funders come onboard. It's a real privilege to work with the kind
of talented, hard working creative folks, who are part of PubMed Central
and, you know, when I'm working on other projects and I come back and see what's been accomplished
it's just incredibly exciting...so it's a real privilege to work with them all.
When you look back on this, say, 15 or 20 years from now, the sharing of these data
and reports from grant-supported work will seem so obvious people will wonder how
could they possibly do it any differently. So anyway, many thanks to everyone present
who helped, aided and abetted and designed "and probably did a little maneuvering as
well to be sure that PubMed Central succeeded, and long may it wave. "