Patient Inform

(updated September 6, 2011)

Background:

Patient INFORM is a joint initiative between publishers and voluntary health organizations (VHO) to make the scholarly literature on certain medical topics more accessible to the general public. Participating VHOs will author summary articles to be hosted on the VHO Web site that provide contextual information about the particular subject. The summary will also contain a link to a targeted full text article residing on various publisher's Web sites. End users reading the VHO summary article will be given clear and free access to the full text of the target article without the need for any additional login procedure.

The Registration Form -- basic step-by-step:

Each article pair (VHO summary and the corresponding publisher full text article) must be registered using this form. Complete field descriptions and usage are given below. The basic step-by-step process is as follows:

Select your VHO from the drop down list and enter the VHO password (one password per VHO organization)
Enter the email address of a VHO staff member who can address problems with this summary article
Enter the URL of the summary article as hosted on the VHO Web site (this field partially auto-fills for certain VHOs)
Enter the DOI or URL of the publisher's article. DOIs are preferred, if you don't know the DOI use the lookup tool at the bottom of the registration form (URL must be of the form http://some.address.domain/full/file/path/filename.html, DOIs should be entered as 10.1234/the-suffix-text). NOTE: to link to a DOI from your Web page you will build a URL as follows: http://dx.doi.org/the-doi
Fill in the optional fields. Complete titles and descriptions are strongly encouraged as these will help find and manage article pairs.
Hit the Save button

screenshot of patient inform registry form

Submitting the form will produce one of two outcomes.

A notice will be displayed stating that everything went Ok. In this case the article pair has been registered and the publisher was notified. Access to the publisher's full text article will begin almost immediately
The publisher could not be contacted. In this case the article pair has been registered, however, the publisher could not be immediately contacted. Email notifications will go to Patient INFORM staff who will manually contact the publisher. Access to the publisher's full text article will not be enabled until this situation is rectified. The email address given in the form is important for Patient INFORM staff to use in contacting the VHO on this matter.

The Registration Form -- field details:

URL of Summary Item: The complete Web address of the summary article hosted on the VHO Web site. This address is very important for use by the publisher in granting access to the full text article. Only readers coming from this page will be given access. Please contact your VHO Web site administrator if you don't know what to fill in here.

Target Article: The location of the publisher article, DOIs are preferred. DOIs are simple identifiers for articles that can be used instead of a URL. They are more reliable than URLs since if the article is moved the DOI will always find it. Use the DOI lookup function at the bottom of the registration form to find a DOI.

24-hour delay: You may be registering an article pair before the summary article is actually posted to the VHO Web site. Since publishers will be linking back to the VHO summary article this simple option tells the publisher to not link back for at least 24 hours. This prevents broken links from the publisher back to the VHO. If you know the VHO summary article will not be available within 24 hours, please hold off registering the article pair.

Referring URL: In certain cases a VHO may want user to link to the publisher from an interim page other than the summary article. This URL can be used for that purpose. Please contact your VHO Web site administrator. Typically this field will be left empty if the users go directly from the summary to the publisher's article.

Title: The title of the summary article hosted on the VHO Web site

Description: A description of the summary article's topic, possibly making mention of the publisher's full text article.

VHO Author: Full name of the summary article's author.

The DOI lookup tool:

If you only know basic bibliographic information about the publisher's article you can search for it DOI. Simply enter as much information as you can and select "Lookup" (note: you must supply either the author's last name or the starting page for the article).

In the results you may click on the DOI link to view the article, which will open in a separate window. If this is the target article, click "Use This DOI" to auto-fill the DOI into the appropriate field at the top of the registration form.

screenshot of DOI Lookup Tool

link

support@crossref.org