Medline: ERL versus Pub/Med. Valutazione comparativa tra l'accesso a Medline Pub/Med della National Library of Medicine e l'accesso a Medline su ERL [Italian]

After reading the press conference (available in the NLM web page) and evaluating the new condition of access, here are some consideration on the Pub/Med service presented by U.S. National Library of Medicine in Bethesda (NLM) on the 26th June 1997. The 26th of June 1997 was the official date in which the service was launched. However, as everybody knows, it was possible to have free access on Internet before the 26th of June as well because there were web interfaces which offer free access to MEDLINE with some restrictions, for example not the whole database was at your disposal but only information from a certain year onwards or some databases were not updated with the recent information. These websites, still available and accessible, give at your disposal quite raw interfaces and the functionalities are quite limited. An example of this is the access to HealthGate, Medscape or Kfinger websites which, among the other services, send weekly to subscribed users the medical news taken from the articles with the major scientific impact thanks to SDI (Selective Dissemination Information) via e-mail. As far as the access to NLM is concerned, up to some time ago, the user had to sign in with a password to have access to MEDLINE via Internet through the payment of a subscription fee. Therefore, online access for the retrieval of medical information in MEDLINE or in other database of NLM was limited and with fee. The access was limited to doctors and experts in the field, researchers in the medical-scientific sector, librarians, archivists and technicians of information