Journals
on the Web
Many journals are available on the Web in full text, but free
access is often limited to subscribers. Most academic medical
center libraries maintain online subscriptions for students and
faculty (Links to full-text journal articles can be found within
Ovid or PubMed searches, depending on the institution).
When you see the 
icon (green banner) in the Summary display of your PubMed search
results, it means you can see the full text article for free.
An increasing number of journals provide free full text access
to all or some of their articles, sometimes within six months
or a year after initial publication. Here are some additional
sources of free full text articles:
PubMed Central
The National Library of Medicine's PubMed
Central is an archive of free full-text articles. Articles
in PubMed Central are sometimes also available from the publishers'
Web sites, but those in PubMed Central are published in a standard
format to insure their permanence on the Web.
When you see the 
icon (orange and green banner) in the Summary display of your
PubMed
results, it means that the article can be found in PubMed
Central. If you like, you can use the "limits" tab
in PubMed and, under "subsets," limit your searches
to PubMed Central.
Open Access Journals
An increasing number of journals are developing publishing models
that facilitate free access to full text articles. Some institutions,
such as the University of California at San Francisco, encourage
researchers to consider publishing their work in open
access or reasonably priced journals as means of protecting
scholarly communication. Here are some resources:
Directory of
Open Access Journals (DOAJ)
BioMed
Central
Public Library
of Science (PLoS)
A recent
essay in the New England Journal of Medicine (April 13,
2006), discusses the issue of open access journals.
Finding Journal Names
If you need help in finding the name of a journal, try the Entrez
Journals Database. The opening page also provides the means
to find information about Entrez journals that have links
to full-text web sites.
Articles Not Available on the Web
Much of what you find in MEDLINE will not be available on the
Web as a full-text document, but you can still obtain a copy if
you do not have convenient access to a medical library. The National
Library of Medicine's Loansome Doc allows you to order documents
after first establishing an agreement with a nearby medical library.
Detailed information about Loansome
Doc is available on the National Library of Medicine’s
Web Site, in the Fact Sheets section. Links to Loansome Doc are
built into PubMed and NLM Gateway. Documents are available in
a variety of forms (mail, fax, pickup, or internet), depending
on the capacity of the local library. Charges vary, also depending
on the local library.
If you have an My
NCBI account (a free PubMed service), you can configure it
for other document delivery services (Loansome Doc is the default). |