Phil Davis Consulting, 432 Mitchell St., Ithaca, NY 14850, USA.
FASEB J. 2013 Jul;27(7):2536-41. doi: 10.1096/fj.13-229922. Epub 2013 Apr 3.
Does PubMed Central--a government-run digital archive of biomedical articles--compete with scientific society journals? A longitudinal, retrospective cohort analysis of 13,223 articles (5999 treatment, 7224 control) published in 14 society-run biomedical research journals in nutrition, experimental biology, physiology, and radiology between February 2008 and January 2011 reveals a 21.4% reduction in full-text hypertext markup language (HTML) article downloads and a 13.8% reduction in portable document format (PDF) article downloads from the journals' websites when U.S. National Institutes of Health-sponsored articles (treatment) become freely available from the PubMed Central repository. In addition, the effect of PubMed Central on reducing PDF article downloads is increasing over time, growing at a rate of 1.6% per year. There was no longitudinal effect for full-text HTML downloads. While PubMed Central may be providing complementary access to readers traditionally underserved by scientific journals, the loss of article readership from the journal website may weaken the ability of the journal to build communities of interest around research papers, impede the communication of news and events to scientific society members and journal readers, and reduce the perceived value of the journal to institutional subscribers.
PubMed Central（一个由政府运营的生物医学文章数字档案库）是否与科学学会期刊竞争？对营养、实验生物学、生理学和放射学 14 种学会运行的生物医学研究期刊 2008 年 2 月至 2011 年 1 月期间发表的 13223 篇文章（5999 篇治疗，7224 篇对照）进行的纵向回顾性队列分析表明，当美国国立卫生研究院（NIH）资助的文章（治疗）可从 PubMed Central 知识库免费获得时，期刊网站上全文 HTML 文章的下载量减少了 21.4%，便携文档格式（PDF）文章的下载量减少了 13.8%。此外，PubMed Central 对减少 PDF 文章下载的影响随着时间的推移而增加，每年增长 1.6%。全文 HTML 下载没有纵向影响。虽然 PubMed Central 可能为传统上无法从科学期刊获得服务的读者提供了补充访问途径，但期刊网站上文章阅读量的减少可能会削弱期刊围绕研究论文建立兴趣群体的能力，阻碍新闻和事件向科学学会成员和期刊读者的传播，并降低期刊对机构订阅者的感知价值。
