Hi,

Some more welcome news. I thought members of this list might be interested
in this press release about another digitisation project that will provide
free access to the backfiles of some key journals via PubMed Central.

Press Release

Archive of medical journals to go online

An archive of medical journals, some dating back more than 125 years, will
be made freely available on the Internet.

The Wellcome Trust, the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC), and the
U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM) are joining forces to digitise the
complete backfiles of a number of important and historically significant
medical journals. The digitised content will be made freely available on the
Internet - via PubMed Central <http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/
<http://www.pubmedcentral.org/> > and augment the content already available
there.

With funding of £1.25 million [£750,000 from the Trust, £500,000 from JISC]
the project plans to digitise around 1.7 million pages of text. The NLM will
manage the project, host the archive and ensure that the digital files are
preserved in perpetuity.

The list of journals to be digitised will include the Annals of Surgery,
Biochemical Journal, Journal of Physiology and Medical History. Digitisation
will commence in Summer 2004 and the first titles will be online early in
2005.

Once the backfiles are digitised, a significant new body of medical
literature will be freely available on the Internet. Examples include:

· Sydney Ringer's original research, (published in the Journal of Physiology
in the 1880's), on the actions of inorganic salts on living tissues; work
that provided the theoretical basis for the development of saline infusion
in clinical practice, a pre-requisite for most modern surgery.

· Research by Michell and colleagues (Biochemical Journal, 1983) and Carter,
Kinnersley and Peters that led to the discovery of vitamin B5 (Biochemical
Journal, 1930Berridge et al (Biochemical Journal, 1984) that set the scene
for all subsequent work leading to the demonstration that IP3 is a second
messenger that releases calcium from intracellular stores; findings that
have had a major impact in the field of cell signalling.

· Robert Gross and John Hubbard's reports on successful surgical repairs for
congenital heart disease (Annals of Surgery, 1939).

In addition to creating a digital copy of every page in the backfiles, the
digitisation process will also create a PDF file for every discrete item
(article, editorial, letter, advertisements etc.) in the archive, and use
optical character recognition (OCR) technology to generate searchable text.

Although the project focuses on digitising backfiles, publishers will also
include new issues of the selected journals on an ongoing basis subject to
an embargo period, as defined by each participating publisher.

Dr Mark Walport, Director of the Wellcome Trust, warmly welcomed the project
and said: "This international partnership will create an invaluable historic
archive which will provide fascinating insights for today's research,
teaching and clinical communities worldwide. This project is in close accord
with the Trust's declared position on the desirability of open access to
scientific literature".

"This is a major step in our continuing effort to preserve and freely make
available an important segment of medical literature" said Donald A.B
Lindberg, M.D., Director of the National Library of Medicine. "The project
is an example of truly useful international collaboration for the benefit of
all."

Professor Sir Graeme Catto, President of the General Medical Council and
Vice Principal of King's College London (host of JISC's London office),
welcomed the announcement, saying: "I am delighted that the
JISC-NLM-Wellcome Trust project will enable users to have free access to the
back files of some of the UK's and US's most significant medical journals
through PubMed Central. This innovative project will have important
implications for the learning, teaching and research communities, but its
commitment to open access will mean it has great importance beyond the
education world too."

The Medical Journals Backfiles Digitisation Project is one of six
digitisation projects with funding for the Higher Education Funding Council
(HEFCE). The overall programme, being managed by JISC, represents a total
investment of some £10m to be applied to delivering high quality content
online, including sound, moving pictures, census data and still images for
long-term use by the further and higher education communities in the UK.

Further information about this project can be found at:
http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/backfiles.

For further information, please contact:
Robert Kiley
Wellcome Library - Head of Systems Strategy
Tel: 020 7611 8338
Email [log in to unmask]

Stuart Dempster
JISC Programme Manager
Tel: 020 7848 2564
Email: [log in to unmask]

Wellcome Trust media contact:
Barry Gardner:
Tel: 020 7611 7329.
Email: [log in to unmask]

JISC media contact
Dr Philip Pothen
JISC Communication Manager
Tel: 020 7848 2935
Email: [log in to unmask]

NLM media contact:
Bob Mehnert
Office of Communications and Public Liaison
Tel: 301 496 6308
Email: [log in to unmask]

Cheers
Lesley

~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~~
Lesley Crawshaw, Faculty Information Consultant,
Learning and Information Services,
University of Hertfordshire, Hatfield, AL10 9AB UK
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e-mail: [log in to unmask]
phone: 01707 284662 fax: 01707 284666
web: http://www.herts.ac.uk/lis/subjects/natsci/ejournal/
list owner: [log in to unmask]
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