13.0469 new on WWW: HighWire Press archive

From: Humanist Discussion Group (willard@lists.village.virginia.edu)
Date: Tue Mar 07 2000 - 19:23:04 CUT

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                   Humanist Discussion Group, Vol. 13, No. 469.
           Centre for Computing in the Humanities, King's College London
                   <http://www.princeton.edu/~mccarty/humanist/>
                  <http://www.kcl.ac.uk/humanities/cch/humanist/>

             Date: Tue, 07 Mar 2000 16:24:43 +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.



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