Free and Open Access Links: Medicine and Health Sciences

Information about medicine and health science specific online resources that are open access so available to all researchers and medicine and health science specific online resources that are freely available to researchers in developing and emerging countries.

American Medical Association (AMA)
The scientific publications of the American Medical Association, through HINARI (Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative)  http://www.healthinternetwork.net/, are made available to the poorer countries of the world at very low rates. Scientific journal titles include: The Journal of the American Medical Association (JAMA); Archives of Dermatology; Archives of Facial Plastic Surgery; Archives of General Psychiatry; Archives of Internal Medicine; Archives of Neurology; Archives of Ophthalmology; Archives of Otolaryngology--Head and Neck Surgery; Archives of Pediatrics and Adolescent Medicine and Archives of Surgery.

BioMed Central
BioMed Central offers online publishing of articles in all areas of original biomedical research with full peer review and open access. Submission is online and authors retain copyright. All original articles are published in one of the BioMed Central journals (over 100 Open Access journals covering all areas of Biology and Medicine), as well as being posted without delay on PubMed Central and indexed in PubMed.

BMJ Journals
Free access to the electronic version of the British Medical Journal Publishing Group's 25 specialist journals now including Evidence-based journals. These are freely accessible to anybody in the 100 poorest countries in the world. Users should follow the standard subscription procedures as the BMJ subscription system will automatically recognise the origin of access.

Cancer.gov
Free to search abstract database from the US National Cancer Institute.

Essential Health Links
A Gateway to selected Web sites of special interest to health professionals, medical library communities, publishers, and NGOs in developing and transitional countries. It covers General Resources (search engines, gateways, bibliographic databases, abstracts, clinical trials databases, research networks, dictionaries, glossaries, disease classifications, evidence based medicine, full-text E-books, image collections, journals, newsletters, medical education resources, news, useful email lists, and WHO sites); plus Subject Index (e.g. Anaesthesiology, Basic Sciences, Dermatology, HIV/AIDS etc.); plus Library and Publishing Support and Use of ICTs (Information for Development, Internet Skills, Medical Informatics/E-Health, Publishing Tools).

FreeBooks4Doctors
The AMEDEO Group are now making many important medical textbooks available online, free and in full-text. 1 Currently 600 titles are included in the service, sorted by speciality and title. FreeBooks4Doctors! also provides a free alert service as new titles are added.

Free Medical Journals
The Free Medical Journals Site is dedicated to the promotion of free access to medical journals over the Internet. Currently1380 full-text journals sorted by subject, language, and title, as well as highlight free journals with high impact factors. There is also a mailing list to alert you as new free journals are added to their list. Some journals are available in French, Portuguese  and Spanish.

Geneva Foundation for Medical Education and Research
Collection of open access and free journals in a wide range of medical disciplines.

Global Library of Women's Medicine (GLOWM)
The Global Library of Women's Medicine is designed to be a constantly evolving resource reflecting the very best of current medical opinion. It is specifically designed to support the work of physicians (and other medical professionals). For this reason doctors are given the option of free registration which makes certain additional features of the site available to them and allows them to take part in the interactive options offered. Resources available include 442 specialist chapters on women's medicine, plus 53 supplementary chapters, authored by over 650 expert contributors citing more than 40,000 references.

Guide to Electronic Health Care/Medical Libraries on the Internet
The Guide to Electronic Health Care/Medical Libraries on the Internet  strives to provide users with a comprehensive and up-to-date guide on the major sources of free full-text health books and journals. Please note that there are restrictions on access to some resources listed.

Health InterNetwork Access to Research Initiative (HINARI)
HINARI provides a vast library of the latest and best information on public health: more than 2,000 scientific publications, one of the world's largest collections of biomedical literature.

INDMED
Indias contribution in the areas of biomedical research and health care has been significant and conforming to international standards. However, only a small fraction of it is available for reference through international bibliographic databases. In an effort to redress this imbalance, the National Informatics Centre of India has developed INDMED. Initially this site offers access to the tables of contents and abstracts of 75 leading Indian journals. More journals would be added to the list as their quality improves in coming years. Access to this database is free and open to all users. See also http://medind.nic.in/ for a one point resource of peer reviewed Indian biomedical literature covering full text of IndMED journals.

Intute: Health and Life Sciences
A free online service providing access to the very best web resources for education and research, evaluated and selected by a network of subject specialists.

Lancet.Com 
An international health and e-print server organised by The Lancet. Free registration is required.  Free access is available to pre-print articles and unpublished work. The Lancet is committed to making educational resources accessible to clinicians in resource-poor countries. This electronic research archive in international health enables authors to self-archive research relevant to medicine in the developing world, with subsequent comments on the research posted alongside.

MedicalStudent.com
MedicalStudent.com is described as a digital library of authoritative medical information for all students of medicine. It is meant to serve as a "pico portal" for users interested in quality medical resources on the Internet. Contains over 250 medical textbooks arranged alphabetically in topics from Anatomy to Urology. Each textbook included is free to use, in part or in whole.

Mother, Infant and Young Child Nutrition & Malnutrition
With new technologies, increased resources and greater understanding now more available than ever for tackling malnutrition, practice on the ground is still struggling to show results as it attempts to keep up with the pace. This website and the links contained therein aim to address these shortfalls by offering online access to the latest worldwide developments in the fields of preventive and curative nutrition. A section of the resource is devoted to addressing mother and child nutrition and malnutrition in India.

POPLINE Database
POPLINE, the world's largest bibliographic database on population, family planning, and related issues, is now available free of charge on the Internet. All 280,000 citations, representing published and unpublished literature, can be accessed for no charge. Individuals from developing countries can request up to 15 fulltext documents per day through the document delivery service.

Ptolemy Project
A research partnership between the Office of International Surgery at the University of Toronto and members of the Association of Surgeons of East Africa (ASEA), combines the provision of access to high quality electronic health information with a process to evaluate its impact for the participants. It aims to answer the question, does access to full-text health information have a positive effect on surgical practice, teaching and research in East Africa.

PubMed
PubMed, a service of the National Library of Medicine, includes over 14 million citations for biomedical articles back to the 1950's. These citations are from MEDLINE and additional life science journals. PubMed includes links to many sites providing full text articles and other related resources. To access the full text available, please make sure that the box "Free full-text only" is ticked when you perform your search.

PubMedCentral
The U.S. National Library of Medicine's digital archive of life sciences journal literature claims to offer open access to over 80,000 articles from over 100 journals. Access to much of the full text on PMC is free and unrestricted. A journal may make its content available in PMC as soon as it is published, or it may delay its release in PMC for a specified period after initial publication. Current PMC journals have delays ranging up to two years, with most releasing their material six months or less after publication.

Royal College of Psychiatrists (UK)
The Royal College of Psychiatrists allows free access to the online full-text version of its three journals ('British Journal of Psychiatry', 'Psychiatric Bulletin' and 'Advances in Psychiatric Treatment') to 75 different developing countries.

SciELO Public Health
See full entry in Science General section below.

Source
Source is a key point of access to up-to-date, relevant information on international health and disability. Over 25,000 abstracts and resources with many links to full text online are available, with many materials coming from developing countries, and including both published and unpublished literature. Source is updated bi-monthly and covers topics including: disability, development and inclusion, HIV and AIDS, participatory communication, mother and child health, early childhood development, ICT and health.

Washington DC Principles
Forty-eight non-profit publishers of 380 journals each year, representing more than 600,000 members of medical and scientific societies, and posting 800,000 articles on line each year, of which more than 440,000 are free, have signed the "Washington DC Principles for Free Access to Science" whose gist is:

• Selected important articles of interest are free online from the time of publication
• The full text of our journals is freely available to everyone worldwide either immediately or within months of publication, depending on each publisher's business and publishing requirements
• The content of our journals is available free to scientists working in many low-income nations

A list of the journals is available online.

WHO database (WHOLIS)
WHOLIS is the World Health Organization library database containing WHO publications and journal article since 1948. An on-site card catalogue provides access to the pre-1986 technical documents. It contains bibliographic information with subject headings and, for some records, abstracts and full text links are available. Searches can also be undertaken in Spanish and French.

WHO regional health and medical databases 
This links to a collection of health and biomedical databases covering the following regions: Africa, Eastern Mediterranean, South-East Asia, Latin America and the Carribean  (languages: Portuguese, Spanish and English), and Western Pacific. Each regional database includes resources that are not easily found elsewhere, as well as international journals.

WHO Reproductive Health Library
The WHO Reproductive Health Library (RHL) is an electronic review journal published by the Department of Reproductive Health and Research at WHO Headquarters in Geneva, Switzerland. RHL takes the best available evidence on sexual and reproductive health from Cochrane systematic reviews and presents it as practical actions for clinicians (and policy-makers) to improve health outcomes, especially in developing countries. There are separate portals available in French  and Spanish.