---------- Forwarded message ----------
Date: Mon, 6 Mar 2000 10:01:43 +0000
From: Stevan Harnad <harnad@COGLIT.ECS.SOTON.AC.UK>
Subject: HighWire Press's Free Online Archive
James Robinson, News Service (650) 723-5675; e-mail:
jamesrob@stanford.edu
HighWire Press publishers offer more than 137,000 free online
articles
http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl
Stanford University's HighWire Press announced Thursday that
publishers of the journals it hosts now provide free online access
to the full text of more than 137,000 articles. As a result,
HighWire Press is now home to the second-largest free full-text
science archive in the world and the largest in the life sciences
with three entirely free journals, 51 journals offering free back
issues and 32 offering free trial access.
HighWire Press the online journal-production division of the
Stanford University Libraries provides free and subscription-based
access-technology services to more than 180 high-impact journals
and more than 600,000 articles, mostly in the fields of science,
technology and medicine.
"We are extremely pleased with the trend to allow free access on
the part of the publishers we serve, which are largely
not-for-profit scholarly societies and publishers," said Michael A.
Keller, Stanford University Librarian and publisher of HighWire
Press.
"Although it is a decision made by each society, based on the
business plan for each journal, we applaud their willingness to
make the back files more accessible to the public. It helps
fulfill HighWire's mission to support and improve scholarly
communication that is, to make the fruits of scholarly research as
broadly available as possible.
"Further, we think that providing back issues without restriction
helps assure institutional subscribers libraries, universities and
laboratories that they need not rely absolutely on the printed
versions of the journals as backup to online subscriptions."
John Sack, associate publisher and director of HighWire Press,
added, "The HighWire program works because we and the societies
share the same basic goal of advancing scholarship through
dissemination of peer-reviewed, research-based articles. Open
access to back issues works economically for the publishers because
the need for current issues [rather than back issues] drives their
subscriptions and technically because HighWire's access control
software is extremely flexible, and our bandwidth is quite high."
In addition to the free back issues, the participating publishers
offer "toll-free linking" of articles, in which a reader who
subscribes (either individually or through an institution) to one
journal can click on a reference in an article to another article
from another journal and read the full text of the linked article,
whether or not that reader has subscription rights to that second
journal.
This powerful service to the reader means that a further 70,000
articles published online through HighWire can be available free in
appropriate contexts. It also greatly facilitates the scholar's
research productivity by enabling a seamless investigation through
the trail of citation and evidence.
HighWire became home to the largest free full-text life science
archives after several key developments following publishers'
decisions: the loading of the 1990-1995 content of Proceedings of
the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), which added nearly 15,000
freely available articles; the annual New Year's release to the
public of the previous volume of the Journal of Biological
Chemistry nearly 5,300 articles for the 1999 volume; and a decision
by the American Physiological Society (APS) to provide free access
to back issues of all its online publications. APS's decision added
more than 5,000 articles to those already free at HighWire-operated
sites.
According to Martin Frank, executive director of the APS, "We have
long supported the idea of disseminating science as widely and
freely as possible. Giving the world access to our 13
subscription-based journals after 12 months allows us to do just
that. Access to all issues of APS's Advances in Physiology
Education will continue to be available to the world at no charge."
Robert Simoni, professor of biological sciences at Stanford and an
editor of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), said: "We at
ASBMB, publisher of the JBC, are delighted that HighWire has
fostered and facilitated this remarkable innovation [of easily
freeing back content] and helped us meet our society's commitment
to barrier-free access to research information. Journals in the
HighWire group now release their back issue papers free in order to
better serve both the authors and readers. HighWire and its
publishers now provide the largest repository of free research
information in the life sciences in the world."
JBC and PNAS began the program of free back issues along with
Rockefeller University Press' three journals the Journal of Cell
Biology, the Journal of Experimental Medicine and the Journal of
General Physiology when they discussed a common concern about
educational uses of the research literature and recognized that the
electronic technology gave them a no-cost opportunity to serve
those readers. PNAS now also has more than 26,000 articles free
from its 1990-1999 archive. Rockefeller University Press journals
now make several thousand articles free as well.
Subsequently, 17 publishers of more than 50 journals have joined
the program. Some of the largest participants include the entirely
free British Medical Journal, with more than 22,000 free articles
from 1994-2000, and the American Society for Microbiology (ASM),
with nearly 26,000 free articles from its 10 journals for
1995-1999.
"ASM has made the decision to provide free online access to journal
content that is one year old or older on a continuously moving
12-month window," said Samuel Kaplan, chair of the ASM Publications
Board. "We believe this to be the best way of insuring the greatest
possible access to the science published in our journals. ASM views
this to be a major part of its mission. Also, we know that our
journals have a lasting 'shelf life' for print subscribers, so it's
gratifying to know that we now provide an online back-volume
archive to subscribers and non-subscribers alike. ASM is pleased
that this 'milestone' of 130,000 such articles has been achieved
and are proud to have played a role in this achievement."
Other journals and publishers participating in the program include
the four journals of the American Society for Pharmacology and
Experimental Therapeutics, Drug Metabolism and Disposition, the
Journal of Pharmacology and Experimental Therapeutics, Molecular
Pharmacology and Pharmacological Reviews; the Journal of
Neuroscience from the Society for Neuroscience; the Journal of
Clinical Investigation from the American Society for Clinical
Investigation; the two journals of the American Society of Plant
Physiologists, The Plant Cell andPlant Physiology; Clinical
Chemistry from the American Association for Clinical Chemistry;
Molecular Biology of the Cell from the American Society for Cell
Biology; the Journal of Histochemistry and Cytochemistry from the
Histochemical Society; the Biophysical Journal from the Biophysical
Society; the five journals of the American Heart Association,
Circulation, Circulation Research, Hypertension, Stroke and
Arteriosclerosis, Thrombosis and Vascular Biology; Blood from the
American Society of Hematology; Thorax, the Journal of Neurology,
Neurosurgery & Psychiatry and Archives of Disease in Childhood from
the BMJ Publishing Group; the American Journal of Clinical
Nutrition from the American Society for Clinical Nutrition; and
Genes & Development, Genome Research and Learning & Memory from
Cold Spring Harbor Labs Press. A complete list of journals offering
free back issues and free trials is on the HighWire Press website
at http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl.
Stanford's HighWire Press makes it easy for publishers to offer
their content without charge to users. "It really takes only a few
minutes for us to implement a publisher's decision to make content
free on an immediate basis, or delayed by a number of months or a
volume," Sack said. As a result, several other societies and
publishers are considering making their back content free under
this program.
Additional information about HighWire is found at
http://highwire.stanford.edu. This page also includes links to all
journals placed online by HighWire for their publishers, links to
the 10 largest archives of free science articles and links to the
500 most-frequently cited journals' online sites.
