White House Author

In his 24 years as the founding director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the National Institutes of Health’s National Library of Medicine (NLM), Dr. Lipman has had a tremendous impact on the amount of biomedical data and health information that are publicly and easily available to drive scientific discovery, help clinicians and patients, and promote development of innovative products and services. Dr. Lipman and his staff have built upon GenBank, the world’s largest public database of DNA data, with the development of more than 40 interlinked genomic and bibliographic databases freely available on the Web. Of particular note, in 2000, Dr. Lipman introduced PubMed Central (PMC) to provide free permanent electronic access to the full text of articles from participating journals, with rich links to related scientific data. PMC provided the essential infrastructure for the NIH Public Access Policy, which since 2008 has made published NIH-funded research freely available to all for the benefit of public health.