BioMed Central is an independent publisher of peer reviewed open access biomedical journals. The full text of the research articles in these open access journals is available to all – no subscription needed. For this publication model to be fiscally sustainable, authors must pay an article processing charge when their articles are accepted for publication. And today, some authors are able to pay these fees through the direct use of their research grants.

For the past couple of years, the IU libraries have jointly supported publication in these journals by underwriting our author’s publication charges. The BioMed Central independent open access model has been relatively successful, and a small number of faculty at IUB, the medical school and Informatics have successfully submitted research articles to the reviewers of BioMed Central journals.

Unfortunately, in recent months, we’ve received notification from BioMed Central of substantial fee increases. In light of this information, the libraries cannot justify further fiscal commitment to this service. Our contractual agreement with BioMed Central to subsidize faculty publication will terminate in May 2007 and will not be renewed.

The IU School of Medicine Library now provides access to EMBASE, a bibliographic database considered the European equivalent of MEDLINE. It can be accessed via the Ovid database menu if you connect via the IUSM medical library A-Z list (at http://library.medicine.iu.edu) or from other IU campuses. EMBASE is more international in its coverage than MEDLINE and is particularly strong in the drug-related literature. However, it lacks coverage of U.S. government and state publications, nursing, dentistry, and paramedical professions like psychology and chiropractic.

Because it is proprietary and expensive, there is a four concurrent user limit at this time. It should therefore not be used as a substitute for MEDLINE but as a second database to search when a comprehensive retrieval is important, as when writing a systematic review, checking for duplicate case reports, or researching a drug-related question. The two databases should also not be searched at the same time because this disables Ovid’s subject heading mapping feature and defaults to suboptimal keyword searching. Contact medlref@iupui.edu with any questions or comments