Get Your Free Content Here
Posted by: Barbara Bibel
Everyone wants free full text, but , as Mick Jagger said, you can’t always get what you want. There are some places to find it. The Public Library of Science http://plos.org publishes seven peer-reviewed science and medical journals. It has just added a new feature PLOS Currents, where researchers can share and discuss their latest findings in a moderated online forum. Highwire Press at Stanford University http://highwire.stanford.edu“hosts the largest repository of high-impact, peer-reviewed content” which includes 1,935,615 free articles. PubMed Central, a subset of the National Library of Medicine’s PubMed database, contains free full-text articles. Amodeo, a medical/health sciences news service sponsored by a consortium of drug companies provides a site called Free Medical Journals at www.freemedicaljournals.comwhich makes content available without charge once the embargo period ends. If you can’t get the text, you can at least get the table of contents to see what is new in the field. ticTocs, a consortium of publishers and British Universities has a site at http://www.tictocs.ac.uk which makes the table of contents of 12,536 journals from 439 publishers available online at no charge. Where personal or institutional subscriptions permit, one may link to the full-text content. Free registration allows users to set up current awareness files and save their journal lists. These resources are excellent supplements to the databases that libraries have.
