A mentioned in a previous post, in addition to this OA-oriented blog, I’m currently also editing another blog, Cancer Stem Cell News. I recently, using OAIster, searched the “entire record” field for the phrase “cancer stem cell*”. The search for articles about CSC was limited to resource type “text”, and the results were sorted in “date descending” order. This search yielded 167 records. Of these 167, 136 (81%) were obtained from 5/29 (17%) of the contributors. These 5 were: PubMed Central (PMC) [41 records]; CiteBase [39]; HighWire Press, Stanford University [20]; BioMed Central (BMC) [19] and Defense Technical Information Center (DTIC) Repository [17]. The remaining 24/29 contributors (83%) provided 31/167 (19%) of the records. Perhaps, another example of the Pareto principle (for many events, 80% of the effects come from 20% of the causes)?
The most recent article, dated 2008-06-09, was Mammosphere culture of metastatic breast cancer cells enriches for tumorigenic breast cancer cells by Matthew J Grimshaw, Lucienne Cooper, Konstantinos Papazisis, Julia A Coleman, Hermann R Bohnenkamp, Laura Chiapero-Stanke, Joyce Taylor-Papadimitriou and Joy M Burchell. Publisher: BMC. PubMed Citation: Breast Cancer Res 2008; 10(3): R52. Epub 2008 Jun 9. (The full citation for this article isn’t included in the OAIster record).
This same article can also be accessed via PMC. The Conclusion section of the PMC Abstract:
This paper shows, for the first time, that mammosphere culture of pleural effusions enriches for cells capable of inducing tumours in SCID mice. The data suggest that mammosphere culture of these metastatic cells could provide a highly appropriate model for studying the sensitivity of the tumorigenic ‘stem’ cells to therapeutic agents and for further characterisation of the tumour-inducing subpopulation of breast cancer cells.
Comment: A search of PMC for the phrase “cancer stem cells” yielded access to articles published more recently than the one cited above. For example, a search limited to articles added to PMC in the last 30 days (done on November 9) yielded 3 citations, all published in November 2008.
Be openly accessible or be obscure 