From the CASLIS Ottawa Blog, I recently learned that a wealth of Canadian health information will now be available online. The new resource is set to launch in the fall of 2009 and it looks promising. A number of American universities have recently adopted open access policies for faculty research, but I gather this is a first for Canada. The project, “PubMed Central Canada” is a collaboration between the National Research Council’s Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information (NRC-CISTI), the Canadian Institutes of Health Research (CIHR), and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM).
The CASLIS blog post describes the resource thus:
“PMC Canada will be a national digital repository of peer-reviewed health and life sciences literature, including research resulting from CIHR funding. This searchable Web-based repository will be permanent, stable and freely accessible.”
I look forward to exploring this resource when it is launched and I wonder how it will work. Will past medical studies conducted in Canada be included? Will references to studies elsewhere be included (I gather the NLM has a method for coding references to facilitate cross-references) as references? Assuming the primary users of this tool are physicia, medical students and others with a background in medicine, how will consumer/patient issues be handled? A health librarian is one good option to consider, but system design should also take account of this.
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