I have obtained a license to use the PubMed data to build an author registration system similar to the one in the RePEc author service http://authors.repec.org, which has been a tremendous boost to the RePEc digital library http://repec.org, both of which are my creations. Similarly, an author registration service for PubMed would be tremendous boot for PubMed, and I am willing to run it for them at no cost.

The NLM not only said that they would not use records from such a service. The made it an explicit condition that I would not even offer these records to them, so they would not come close to the temptation of saying, yes, we could use them to enhance service.

I am still pursuing work on the creation of such a service. Get back to me privately (krichel@openlib.org) if you want to know more. Use “author service” as a subject line.

For those interested in the NLM’s long-range plan:
http://www.nlm.nih.gov/pubs/plan/lrpdocs.html

Regarding your footnote — I think there’s some truth to it being an advertisement for the products that Collexis sells — but I think the products that they sell are really pretty cool. They are expensive, and so far, their customers seem to be fairly well-heeled research universities. We’ve looked into what they offer here, and while it would help us address a number of issues that we’re looking at in getting our arms around the totality of our research production, it’s not something we’re going to invest in at this point. But they are definitely worth keeping an eye on.

As to BiomedExperts.com itself, although the terms of use say that you can be a Visitor or a Member, I couldn’t figure out how to browse the database without registering. Did you find a way to do that?

Once I registered, the first thing I noticed was that they hadn’t pulled everything out of PubMed that I’ve published in the last ten years. They’re big on their “disambiguation” feature that can sort out the various authors with the same name and decide who is who. One would think, given my last name, that it’d be pretty simple. So how come they missed six out of twenty-one citations?

One of my publications is co-authored by Bruce Madge, and they did find that one. And yet, although they have Bruce in the database, when they constructed my profile, he’s not included as a co-author. Why?

The privacy policy states that you can opt out of having email announcements sent to you by checking the appropriate box on your personal information page. Maybe I just haven’t had enough coffee yet, but I couldn’t find anyplace where I was able to opt out.

My bottom line then (allowing for the fact that I’ve only spent a very few minutes with it and am probably just missing the answers to some of my questions) is that I think it’s very intriguing, has great potential, but is still very much a work in progress. I would like to spend more time with the subject analysis side of it — I just peeked into that and was quite fascinated by some of the topic headings they claim I’ve written about.

And, by the way, I think you’re absolutely right about Krichel’s comment about a “nail in the coffin”. And as far as NLM goes, he might want to peruse their recently published long-range plan.