PubMed Central Canada

» see pubmedcentralcanada.ca as it lived, on the wayback machine

~ the obituary ~

Almost everything I read for work sits on arXiv or behind an IEEE login, so PubMed was never my shelf and a Canadian mirror of it even less so. PMC Canada is worth a grave anyway, because it was a country deciding to hold its own copy of the research it had paid for, and then deciding after eight years that it could not justify the maintenance.

It opened in October 2009 and got its full manuscript submission system on 28 April 2010, run jointly by the Canadian Institutes of Health Research and the NRC's Canada Institute for Scientific and Technical Information. The US National Library of Medicine supplied the platform underneath. CIHR had an open access policy, and the point of the mirror was to give Canadian researchers a domestic place to satisfy it. Roughly 2,900 author manuscripts went in over the whole run.

The last day it accepted a manuscript was Friday 5 January 2018. On 23 February 2018 the site went offline permanently. The stated reasons were the deposit rate and the cost of bringing the system up to Government of Canada web and security standards.

~ the case file ~

~ four percent ~

That figure is the whole obituary compressed into two digits. Since the system was created, about four percent of author manuscripts arising from CIHR-funded work had been deposited by researchers into PMC Canada. Everyone else either published in a journal that deposited to the American archive automatically or submitted there directly, which satisfied the same policy with fewer steps.

A national mirror only earns its running costs if the nation routes through it. This one asked Canadian researchers to make an extra choice on behalf of a domain name, and they did not.

~ where the papers went ~

Nothing was lost in the sense that matters to a scientist. PMC Canada content stayed searchable in PubMed Central in the United States and in Europe PMC, and the CIHR manuscripts moved into the National Research Council's own digital repository. Continuity of the literature was never in question.

The links broke instead. Eight years of citations and reading lists pointed at pubmedcentralcanada.ca, and on 23 February 2018 every one of them stopped resolving.

~ why europe pmc is still here ~

The obvious comparison is Europe PMC, which does the same job on the other side of the Atlantic and is still running. The difference is who is holding it up: Europe PMC is funded by a large consortium of research funders rather than one agency and one national lab, so no single budget review can end it. PMC Canada had two parents, and when both of them looked at the deposit numbers in 2017 they reached the same conclusion at the same time.

@}-->--

              )
             (_)
            .-'-.
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
            |   |
          __|   |__   .-.
       .-'  |   |  `-:   :
      :     `---'     :-'
       `-._       _.-'
           '""""""

« previous  ·  random  ·  next »