Pubmed/PMC as the First Line Resource in Biomedicine Field

Journal of Reproduction and Infertility (JRI) was indexed in Pubmed and Pubmed Central (PMC). This is good news for all authors, reviewers, physicians and researchers that are related to JRI. Launched in February 2000, PMC is a free archive of biomedical and life sciences containing peer reviewed journals. It provides free access to full papers of all contents for scientists, physicians, researchers, and students. Recently, about 3 million articles have been archived in PMC. PMC content is provided in part by 1290 full contribution journals, 265 NIH supported journals and 2253 evaluated and selected worldwide journals. PMC acts as a digital counterpart to NLM hard copy journal collection; it is a repository for journal literature consisting of indexed journals (1). According to criteria stated above, PubMed/PMC remains an important and the first line resource for clinicians and researchers. PubMed/PMC is a very handy, quick, easy to use and popular resource for data in biomedical field. In fact, indexing of journals in prestigious scholarly databases is a way for more visibility of the articles and consequently quality estimation of the indexed journals. Huge numbers of databases are actively collecting academic documents and papers worldwide, but most of them focus on a subspecialty with limited number of selected journals. The most important and popular databases in the fields of sciences and biomedicine are PubMed/PMC, Scopus, Web of Science (ISI) and Google Scholar. PubMed/PMC focuses mainly on medicine and biomedical sciences, whereas Scopus, Web of Science and Google Scholar cover most of the scientific fields. Web of Science covers old publications since its indexed and archived records go back to 1900. PubMed/PMC allows the larger number of keywords per search but is the only database among them that does not provide citation analysis. Scopus includes articles published from 1966 on, but results of citation analysis are available only for articles published after 1996. In contrast to Scopus or Web of Science, the major advantage of PubMed/PMC is that literature is readily updated online in an early version before print publication by various journals (2). Authors’ reluctance to pay publication fees is a reason for their willingness to publish their works in open access journals. While open access has the potential to expand the authorship and readership of the scientific literature, it is considered that open access publishing leads to an increase in the publication of poor quality research. Access to the journal is not usually an important problem for the authors. Several key factors including journal accessibility, reputation, quality (citation impact), frequency of publication (number of issues per year), and publication fees are crucial ones for authors to decide where to submit their manuscripts. Thus free access is not a significant factor in their decisions for selection of a journal (3). However, many publishers of open access journals charge authors. Article processing charges (APC) provide the ground for the acceptance of sub-standard articles since the journals’ income is related to the number of accepted manuscripts. There are few reports of some APC-funded open access publishers with extremely low quality standards. Therefore, in order to avoid compromising the quality of journals and reducing the economic pressure of editors in chief for publishing low quality articles, it is recommended that journal publishers consider the alternative sources of revenue for providing journals’ finance (4). JRI is a peer reviewed, open access and free of charge journal and its articles are indexed in PubMed/PMC, Scopus, Google Scholar and several other scholarly databases. Recently, we applied for being indexed in Web of Science (ISI) in response to numerous requests of the authors who want to publish their articles in Journal of Reproduction and Infertility.