The Bioethics Research Library

Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery Services

The Bioethics Research Library at Georgetown is a participating DOCLINE library. DOCLINE is the US National Library of Medicine’s interlibrary loan service and it is available to researchers from the US and other countries.

Researchers request articles via their local library’s Interlibrary Loan program instead of contacting the Bioethics Research Library directly. The Library can provide copies of articles from journals to which it subscribes as well as chapters from books in its collection. The Bioethics Research Library is a reference library and its books do not circulate.

If a researcher does not have access to interlibrary loan services, the Bioethics Research Library can help the researcher to find the least expensive way to acquire the document. For example, the cheapest way to obtain copies of articles from the Kennedy Institute of Ethics Journal is through its publisher, Johns Hopkins University Press (800-548-1784; http://muse.jhu.edu/journals/ken/)

If there is no other way for a researcher to acquire a document, the Bioethics Research Library has a fee-based document delivery service. The charges are $20 per document for the first 10 pages, $.20 per page thereafter, plus copyright fees where applicable. In most cases, researchers contact publishers directly due to expensive copyright fees (for example, the Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics charges a $45.00 copyright fee per article).

For questions about Interlibrary Loan/Document Delivery, please contact:

Bioethics Research Library at Georgetown
Kennedy Institute of Ethics
Box 571212
Georgetown University
Washington, DC 20057-1212
202-687-3885; 202-687-8089 (fax)
bioethics@georgetown.edu

International Partnerships for Patrons from Developing Countries

A number of publishers (including HighWire) are participating in initiatives to provide free or low-cost document delivery services to researchers in developing countries. NLM provides links to these programs at:

http://www.nlm.nih.gov/docline/intlresources.html

DOCLINE/Loansome Doc — U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) Interlibrary Loan Service

The U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) maintains DOCLINE, an interlibrary loan service available to both U.S. and international researchers. The user interface for this service is called Loansome Doc, and PubMed searchers can order copies of articles online. To utilize this feature, establish a Loansome Doc account through your local library. For information on this process, refer to the Loansome Doc Fact Sheet

After establishing a Loansome Doc account, you will be able to order PubMed articles online as you search by:

  1. placing a check in front of the article to be ordered; and
  2. selecting the Order option from the Send To drop-down menu.