Med pub crawl.

• Author: Keene, Wallace O.
• Position: Letters

Your article, "Publisher Perish" (October 2001), by Nicholas Thompson, has appeal, and I am grateful for the balance that Thompson sought to bring to the article. Regardless of how appealing the idea of putting all of the information into a single PubMed Central database might be, there are still several major flaws in it.

First, you don't need a single physical database to bring things together. While the federal government's First-Gov Internet site is still working out some kinks, the fact is that you can get access to millions of federal and state websites through this single portal with its amazing search engine.

Second, PMC has the wrong business model. You don't take things that are working well in the private sector and turn them over to the government to administer. And the information that we are talking about is not necessarily public property. Under the guidelines...