From the National Research Council (NRC) - CISTI Partnership Development Office.
PubMed Central Canada – NRC-CISTI and the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR) are working together on plans for PMC Canada — a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health science research resulting from CIHR funding. NRC-CISTI and CIHR have approached the US National Library Medicine to co-sponsor the service, as a mirror site to PubMed Central. CIHR will provide the funding and NRC-CISTI will contribute its technological expertise to build and host the infrastructure and manage and develop the e-repository.
Update: CISTI-CIHR partnership agreement signed (September 2008) – Over the summer, NRC-CISTI and CIHR completed the first step in the creation of PMC Canada – an agreement to partner on creating the e-repository. With CIHR funding now in place, the partners are currently working on the next step, obtaining agreement from the US National Library of Medicine for PMC Canada to 'officially' become part of the broader PubMed Central International (PMCI) network. Once this three-way agreement is in place, the development phase of PMC Canada can begin.
Comment: PubMedCentral International is a great example of win-win-win for everyone. U.S. citizens benefit from a mirror site of the original PMC that helps to ensure preservation and public access, as well as the metadata and documents from Canadian health research that will eventually be deposited first into PMC. For Canada, PMC-Canada means a local open access archive for depositing and archiving results of research funded here, added security for preservation and public access, and a portal to medical literature that can be customized to meet Canadian needs, such as bilingualism. So far, there is only one PMC site operational outside of the U.S, UK-PMC.
Thanks to Jim Till.
This post is part of the Canadian Leadership in the Open Access Movement series.
