OrthoDoc

This site was right under my nose all the time. I was aware of PubMed and had been regularly using it to search for journal articles when researching on any particular topic. Unfortunately I was able to access only the abstracts and not the articles. Nevertheless it was a one-stop place for searching for articles. PubMed is one of the several databases maintained by the National Institutes of Health (NIH).

But PubMed Central beats them all. I became aware of its existence only recently. Initially I thought I had been blind. But when a friend and a colleague claimed ignorance, I knew we may not have been the only ones!

PubMed Central is a digital archive of life sciences journal literature at the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), developed and managed by NIH’s National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) in the National Library of Medicine (NLM). With PubMed Central, NLM is taking the lead in preserving and maintaining unrestricted access to the electronic literature, just as it has done for decades with the printed biomedical literature.

It is not a journal publisher. NLM believes that giving all users free and unrestricted access to the material in PubMed Central is the best way to ensure the durability and utility of the archive as technology changes over time.

In addition to Highwire Press, here is another important source of articles for Orthopods. In simple words PubMed central maintains a database of all articles that are available free of cost (free access).

Tags: Pubmed, pubmed central, Free access