In today’s increasingly interconnected world, with published content (books, chapters, journals, articles, data sets, websites and many others) available seemingly at the click of a button or stroke of a key following a search using any of the major search engines, it might seem perverse to expect journal articles to be indexed in specific Abstracting and Indexing databases. However, ubiquity (or apparent ubiquity) comes at a price; because of the sheer number of items that are theoretically available online, searches must be quite specific unless you are prepared to filter further or wade through thousands or hundreds of thousands of results. Hence, subject-specific abstracting databases have tended to become primary resources. One of the largest, if not the largest, in biomedical and life sciences, is MEDLINE®, provided by the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the United States via the PubMed® database. The differences between MEDLINE® and PubMed® are explained on NLM’s website (http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/factsheets/dif_med_pub.html). Of course, MEDLINE® is not the only indexer and Journal of Developmental Origins of Health and Disease (J DOHaD) is also indexed by several other major services, including Thomson Reuters Web of Science™ and Elsevier’s Scopus.
MEDLINE® includes over 21,000,000 references stretching back to 1946, and currently indexes over 5600 academic journals. A key point to note is that MEDLINE® is selective in the journals it includes, which must meet stringent criteria and are subject to a period of detailed evaluation by a selection committee before a decision is made on whether or not a specific journal is added to the database. A common misperception is that MEDLINE® indexes all relevant journals, however, only those that are deemed appropriate are indexed. It was therefore with great pleasure that we learned that the database selected J DOHaD for inclusion earlier this year. Once the official notification was received, the technical team at Cambridge worked with the NLM to meet their file-format requirements and to set up the automatic metadata feeds with the result that articles for the 2014 volume are now indexed. Users of the database can jump directly to the article in the Journal’s pages in Cambridge Journals Online, with full access if a subscription is held. Some earlier articles are also included in the results in PubMed®, because they have been deposited into the National Institute of Health’s (NIH’s) article repository, PubMed Central (PMC). Being included in MEDLINE® is a major step for the Journal and it will increase the visibility and profile significantly.
PMC is a free archive for complete journal articles, not just their abstracts, and is a repository for journal content that has been submitted in order to comply with the NIH Public Access Policy and similar policies of other funding agencies. Where J DOHaD authors are funded by NIH (or other relevant funders), and pay for Gold Open Access, Cambridge will submit their published paper for inclusion in PMC. Where J DOHaD authors are funded by NIH (or other relevant funders), but do not pay for Gold Open Access, Cambridge is developing the ScholarOne Manuscripts™ submission and peer-review system to deposit a copy of the Accepted Manuscript (definitions of the various versions of scholarly articles can be found on the National Information Standards Organization’s website, http://www.niso.org/publications/rp/RP-8-2008.pdf) on behalf of the author. Until this process is functionally live, authors should continue to deposit their Accepted Manuscripts into PMC themselves. The intention of PMC is to provide an alternative Open Access route to published research that has been publicly funded by NIH (and other relevant funders) if an individual does not have subscription access to a journal.
PMC is not the only potential alternative source for providing free access to journal articles. Under the terms and conditions of the publisher–author agreement, authors may deposit a copy of their Accepted Manuscript on their personal institutional webpage immediately on acceptance, or into their Institutional Repository or a non-commercial Subject Repository 6 months after the online publication of the definitive article (the Version of Record). For each deposit we ask that bibliographical details of the published article are included along with a link to the individual article on Cambridge Journals Online (CJO, www.journals.cambridge.org/doh). For commercial repositories (such as Social Science Research Network) or social media sites (such as Mendeley, Academia.edu, ResearchGate, etc.) we ask that the author deposits only a copy of the published abstract plus bibliographical details and a link to the individual article on CJO (www.journals.cambridge.org/doh). The reason for different versions to be placed in different locations is to manage the balance between the aim to provide access to information to as wide an audience as possible with the desire to maintain the viability of the Journal without compromising subscriptions.
