Open Access Publishing in India: Coverage, Relevance, and Future Perspectives

Open access (OA) publishing is a recent phenomenon in scientific publishing, enabling free access to knowledge worldwide. In the Indian context, OA to science has been facilitated by government-funded repositories of student and doctoral theses, and many Indian society journals are published with platinum OA. The proportion of OA publications from India is significant in a global context, and Indian journals are increasingly available on OA repositories such as Pubmed Central, and Directory of Open Access Journals. However, OA in India faces numerous challenges, including low-quality or predatory OA journals, and the paucity of funds to afford gold OA publication charges. There is a need to increase awareness amongst Indian academics regarding publication practices, including OA, and its potential benefits, and utilize this modality of publication whenever feasible, as in publicly-funded research, or when platinum OA is available, while avoiding falling prey to poor quality OA journals.

Medical Databases from Korea and Abroad

Researchers and journal editors need to be familiar with the major and most widely-used indexing databases. The specific and sensitive searching ability of medical databases always help researchers to avoid redundant studies as well as to provide background to their work. The important medical databases from Korea are KoreaMed, KoreaMed Synapse, KoMCI and KMBase. Major international databases are WPRIM, Medline/PubMed, PubMed Central, Web of Science, SCOPUS, digital object identifier/CrossRef, Google Scholar, EMBASE, Biosis Previews, Worldwidescience.org, and the Cochrane Library. Although every database from Korea is freely accessible to anyone, some international databases require subscription fees. This is the reason why PubMed and PubMed Central, free access databases, have become the most important and widely used ones internationally. Easier access to databases not only from the Web but also from mobile environment applications will continue to develop. Physicians and researchers should be able to use both Web and mobile databases for better patient care and research. Editors should try to add their journals not only to databases from Korea but also to international databases in order to promote the health of all mankind by disseminating the medical information.

Medical Database Search

It is essential to search medical information precisely and efficiently in every aspect of medical practices and research activities. The growth of the medical literature has been tremendous in recent years, as exemplified by the annual growth of 710,000 records in MEDLINE in 2009, thus increasing the complexities of literature searching. Yet database search environments are changing toward very user-friendly ways facilitated by various hypertext linking capabilities such as "LinkOuts" to full texts and "reference linkings" among articles using Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs). Once a direct search of a keyword is initiated, a searcher can continue searching endlessly and seamlessly by simply clicking various links provided in the records retrieved. Search behaviors of researchers are changing accordingly, avoiding any complex or advanced searches. The basics of database search methods are described in this paper. A brief overview of major medical databases is given by database type to illustrate the differences in the information retrievable from such databases: MEDLINE/PubMed and KoreaMed are abstract databases; SCI/Web of Science, SCOPUS and KoMCI are citation indexes; and PubMed Central and Synapse are full text databases. Some of the advanced search features of each database are also noted: searches using MeSH terms in PubMed and KoreaMed; differences in the "related documents" algorithms of PubMed and SCI; citation analysis using "analyze results" in Web of Science and SCOPUS; and citation tracking in Synapse and PubMed. The Journal of the Korean Medical Association (JKMA) records are used for the illustration of such features.