The Elusive Full Text Article
Clinicians and researchers are frustrated when they can't get full text articles. Unfortunately, most publishers' license agreements contain narrow definitions of "authorized users" that exclude alumni.
Like other libraries, the PCOM Library must restrict access to licensed content to current students, faculty, and employees.
The good news is that there is a large and growing body of high quality "open access" literature. Open access is precisely that: access is open to everyone without subscription fees or licensing.
This page identifies sources for high-quality full text. Take a look at the Top Clinical Titles - they are among the most highly cited and open access.
The National Library of Medicine (NLM) of the National Institutes of Health is working on multiple fronts to aid in the COVID-19 response through new initiatives with the global publishing community and artificial intelligence researchers. NLM is expanding access to scientific papers on coronavirus for researchers, care providers, and the public, and for text-mining research. This work makes use of NLM’s PubMed Central® (PMC), a digital archive of peer-reviewed biomedical and life sciences literature.
Top Clinical Titles
The Free Medical Journals site links to many core clinical titles. Many offer automatic table-of-content email alerts. Caveat: not all content is free and some sites require registration.
Full-Text Journals
- Biomed Central JournalsOnline publisher of peer-reviewed, open access, scientific articles in all areas of medical research and biology. Publishes over 250 scientific journals, including BMC Medicine and BMC Biology.
- Directory of Open Access JournalsA community-curated online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality, open access, peer-reviewed journals. DOAJ is maintained by the Infrastructure Services for Open Access.
- Free Medical JournalsSearch by topic, title, popularity, and availability. This database also provides links to free medical books, and Spanish, Portuguese, and French titles.
- HighWire Info, Lists, & LinksA division of the Stanford University Libraries, HighWire Press hosts the largest repository of free, full-text, peer-reviewed content, with 939 journals and over 2 million free, full-text articles online.
- Public Library of Science (PLOS)PLOS publishes peer-reviewed open-access scientific and medical journals that cut across all areas of science and medicine. The platform includes the following titles: Biology, Computational Biology, Genetics, Medicine, Neglected Tropical Diseases, Pathogens, and PLOS One.
- PubMed CentralFree full-text articles from a growing number of publications with direct links in Medline
- SpringerOpen JournalsSpringerOpen Journals contains fully open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, the humanities and social sciences.