Has anyone heard of the "Central Library of Medicine Foundation"? I recently got a request for an article I'm a coauthor on, which reads:


  Dear Dr. NAME REMOVED: 
  
  My name is Victoria Hornos and I am contacting you on behalf of the
  Central Library of Medicine Foundation.  Dr. SANTIAGO ATEHORTUA has
  contacted us asking for a reprint that you wrote. He is a Terapia
  Intensiva and Dr. is in need of your article as Dr. is making a
  research on this subjet . 
  
  JOURNAL NAME 2013;XX(YY):ZZZZ-ZZ On the Reasons Why This Is Clearly A
  Paper That Needs To Be Read, Cited, And Manifest Itself In Fame And
  Fortune For the Authors.
  
  If my request is possible, please send it to the following e-mail
  address or by fax so I can send him or another doctor on the same
  situation the article. 
  
  Thanks very much in advance for your response.
  
  E-mail: victoria.hornos@fbcm.md Fax: (+34 91) 133 30 81 Post Address:
  B1638 CAA Central Library of Medicine Foundation. Zufriategui 627 8º
  (D4D7) - Vicente Lopez Buenos Aires Argentina
  
  Sincerely yours,  Victoria Hornos


I'm not really clear on the legality of this request. I know many people are fine with sending PDFs to particular people, but this sounds like sending it to a clearing house, and that makes me a little nervous. Beyond that, I'm not the corresponding author, 'fbcm.md' doesn't resolve to a webpage, and well...this feels like many, many scam journal requests, but this time as a paper request.

Has anyone encountered this? Thoughts?
After googling for the Central Library of Medicine Foundation, I found the following post on the University of Muenster site (note I used Google Translate to translate the piece from German to English):


  Recently, faculty members have received many article requests from a
  "Central Library of Medicine Foundation", which was apparently
  acting on behalf of South American doctors.
  
  While researchers are usually happy to accommodate private, direct inquiries
  from colleagues, there is naturally some skepticism, since we do not
  know if this service costs the requesting physician or how much
  the "Central Library of Medicine Foundation" receives.
  
  After some inquiries with South American and Spanish-speaking
  colleagues the following picture emerges: the website www.rima.org (The
  "Central Library of Medicine Foundation" aka "Fundación Biblioteca
  Central de Medicina" aka "Red Informática de Medicina Avanzada" (RIMA))
  is a non-library organization based in Buenos Aires that offers physicians
  and researchers to get an article for a given fee (the exact amount is unknown). RIMA neither 
  buys the article from the publisher nor copies it from a local library (which
  presumably cannot afford journals), but services the requests by directly
  forwarding them to the authors, in many cases, Münster faculty members.
  This probably the name "Central Library of Medicine Foundation" is
  used to simulate the unselfish non-profit library.
  
  Everyone must of course know how to handle it themselves. To send a
  reprint by email costs only a push of a button and it helps indeed
  ultimately a colleague who is certainly not as well supplied with
  magazines as oneself. On the other hand, you will be benefiting a commercial (?)
  intermediary organization, which may not help you,
  either. But maybe it is just a clever business idea of 10 unemployed
  Argentine doctors, to help them earn a living. . . .


So it seems that this Central Library of Medicine Foundation is a business that charges a fee to its clients for obtaining a paper, via you. Although this is probably not really legal or moral, this fee is probably lower than what, say, Elsevier is asking for the same paper. I think this situation makes a good argument for open-access journals.