JISC

Attended by more than 100 invited guests from the world of the biosciences – including two Nobel laureates -  a ceremony was held last night at the British Library at which Professor Sir Philip Cohen, President of the Biochemical Society, presented the digital archive of 100 years of the society’s journal to Lynne Brindley, the British Library’s chief executive.

The archive represents the entire back archive of the journal of the Biochemical Society which celebrates its centenary this year. Speaking at the event, Sir Philip thanked JISC and the Wellcome Trust for their funding which has not only paid for digitisation of the journal but will also ensure that the archive, hosted by PubMedCentral, will be openly available to all in perpetuity.

Digitisation of the journal is part of a major collaborative programme of digitisation called the Medical journals backfiles digitisation project, a partnership between JISC, the Wellcome Trust and the US National Library of Medicine which will see the digitisation of nearly 1.7 million pages of complete backfiles from important and historically significant British and American medical journals.

Receiving the digital archive, Lynne Brindley also paid tribute to the funders, saying that this project showed the value of collaboration between publishers (in this instance, Portland Press), funders, the academic community and the national libraries. On the occasion of the society’s anniversary, she also praised the commitment of the programme to the long-term preservation of the 100-year archive.

Robert Kiley, Head of Systems Strategy at the Wellcome Library, spoke of the functionality of the digital archive, containing 392 volumes and 1,340 issues, which will enable researchers, lecturers and students to access fully searchable text and graphics from 1996 in HTML and PDF formats, full internal and external linking and multi-media adjuncts such as moving images and 3-D structures. He also reported that, even prior to its launch, and with no publicity, article downloads from the archive had already reached 948,000.

The Medical journals backfiles digitisation project, of which this journal is a part, is itself one strand of the wider £16m JISC programme which will see the digitisation of major scholarly resources, including 18th century parliamentary papers, historical population reports from 1801 – 1920, 3,000 hours of newsreel from the archives of ITN and Reuters Television, and 19th century newspapers and archival sound recordings from the British Library.