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March 31, 2008

Cancer Literature Through PubMed: Currently 13% is free

Writing in her blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics, Heather Morrison has reported an analysis of the % of free cancer literature that's available thorugh PubMed. I'm sure she'll be tracking the availablity of this literature over time, considering the NIH Public Access mandate that is set to go into force in just a week -- April 7th. What she's finding at this point in time is that most of the cancer literature is NOT freely accessible.

Cancer: 13% of the literature in PubMed on cancer links to Free Fulltext.

By publication date range:
7% - within last 30 days
10% - within the last year
17% - within the last two years
21% - within the last 10 years

Data on other topics indicates a range of percentages of literature that is Free Fulltext. Of the topics selected, the highest percentage was for genetics, with 30% Free Fulltext, and the lowest was dentistry, with 4% fulltext. Most topics appear to be close to the 13% range.

Please refer to the blog entry for a link to the data, which Heather has made freely available via Google's Spreadsheets.

Posted by Katie Newman at March 31, 2008 1:40 PM