In recognition of National Breast Cancer Awareness Month, ebrary has created an open access database about breast cancer at http://site.ebrary.com/lib/breastcancer.

The front page is divided up into tabs, but I found the first tab and the search page most useful. (When I tried looking at the other tabs, ebrary suddenly decided I had to “log in” even though I was on an openly-available site. I had to open the open access database in a different browser to escape that.) The front page provides a list of “Featured Titles” though you can really explore via the topic list, which ranges from “Breast cancer treatment” to “Clinical trials.” “Disparities in Health Care” produced eight documents, most from the National Cancer Institute, while “Alternative Cancer Treatments” provided a wider variety of results, including one in Spanish.

Documents are viewable via a slightly awkward in-browser reader; terms for which you searched are highlighted. You can also search for similar documents, show the table of contents, or export bibliographical information to EndNote, Citavi, or RefWorks.

I did a simple search for genetics and got 27 results, from Family Studies Research Portfolio (National Cancer Institute again) to Cancer Clinical Trials : A Resource Guide for Outreach, Education, and Advocacy.

The resources were well-organized and easy to access, but I very much wish there were more here. As a comparison I went to the PLoS Medicine site (PLoS Medicine is a peer-reviewed medical journal published under a Creative Commons license; it’s available at http://www.plosmedicine.org/home.action) and did a keyword search for “breast cancer”. I found 129 results. Expanding that search across all of the PLoS journals found over 1800 results.

If you’re looking for information on breast cancer, ebrary’s new database is a good place to start. Just don’t stop there.