Knowledge Management Theory and the Evidence-Based Healthcare Model to Guide the Design for an Australasia Open Biomedical Repository

This paper reports on research that fills a unique gap on investigating the concept, viability and potential for an open Australasia biomedical repository, by drawing upon PubMed Central International (PMCI) as a case example. PMCI is the full text article repository for the US National Library of Medicine’s PubMed. An Australasia open biomedical repository could mirror and contribute to other world repositories and include research output with an Australian and New Zealand focus. The research output in an Australasia biomedical repository could include journal literature, guidelines, conference proceedings, reports, patents, books, images, grant details and could link to research data, such as the world clinical trial registries. Major funding bodies in Europe, the USA, the UK and Australia have mandated open access publishing over recent decades. This research focuses on the knowledge management (KM) processes related to open biomedical research and innovation. KM processes are important throughout key research activities. Examining the theoretical KM processes such as knowledge discovery, capture, sharing and application gives an understanding of the importance each of these processes towards the success of open biomedical repositories. Institutional repositories exist throughout Australian universities and the National Library of Australia TROVE harvests the research output from these systems. This paper reports on the KM theories to explain the role of open biomedical repositories as a means to manage and disseminate the results of research. The Evidence-Based Healthcare pyramid is another model used as a lens to give meaning to the array of information resources for finding clinical evidence that are stored in a repository such as PMCI. This paper expands on the role of open biomedical repositories to help transform societies. Lessons from the closure of PMC Canada and the success of Europe PMC have informed this research.