JISC

Complete back issues covering nearly 200 years of historically significant biomedical journals are being made freely available online as a result of a landmark project launched today at the Wellcome Trust.

On completion, the back files project will deliver over three million pages of medical journals free to anyone through standard search tools such as PubMed and Google.

The initiative was developed through a partnership between the Wellcome Trust, JISC, the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and a number of medical journal publishers.

The archive, will contain a number of discoveries which have changed the face of medicine, including:

• Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the use of penicillin to fight bacterial infections. British Journal of Experimental Pathology, 1929 (continued as the International Journal of Experimental Pathology)
• Sir Richard Doll’s groundbreaking study that confirmed that smoking was a “major cause” of lung cancer. BMJ, 1954
• Walter Reed’s paper that proved that yellow fever is transmitted by mosquitoes.  Journal of Hygiene, 1902 (continued as Epidemiology and Infection)
• Kenneth Burton’s classic and highly cited “methods” paper that provided a standard way of assaying DNA concentration in a solution using diphenylamine.  Biochemical Journal, 1956 (online now)
• Hodgkin's and Huxley's Nobel-prize winning paper on ionic theory of the nerve impulse.  This work was the foundation for thousands of subsequent studies of electrical signalling in the brain and has been useful for understanding the origins of many disorders - such as multiple sclerosis, muscle myotonias, and heart arrhythmias - that result from defects in electrical signalling.  Journal of Physiology, 1952 (online now)
• Frederick Treves 1888 paper in which he described the first operation on an inflamed appendix.  On publication, the paper was not initially well received as surgical intervention was discouraged in such cases.  Seven years later this became the accepted practice.  Medico-Chirurgical Transactions, 1888, (continued as the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine)
• Arunlakshana and Schild’s 1959 paper on the characteristics of drug binding to receptor sites.  Using the approach articulated in this paper the authors showed, for example, that the histamine receptors in various guinea pig and human tissues were the same.  British Journal of Pharmacology, 1959
• Participating publishers have also agreed to continue to deposit current content of their journals into this archive. They will be freely available after an embargo period – a maximum of one year for all research papers.

In addition to the faithful replication of every published page, the archive provides a number of innovative, value-added functions, including links from references to full text, high resolution images, full text searching across the entire archive, and links from the original article to corrections and retractions and vice-versa.

 Director of the Wellcome Trust, Dr Mark Walport, said:

“This growing collection will be of lasting benefit to researchers, practitioners and medical historians worldwide. It will provide access to important scientific literature from the past, free of charge, to anyone in the world with internet access.”

JISC's Executive Secretary, Dr Malcolm Read, said:

“This archive and its commitment to free and open access to the outputs of scientific research demonstrates the value of collaboration between funding bodies, publishers and the academic and research communities. JISC is delighted to have worked closely with the Wellcome Trust and the National Library of Medicine on what is an impressive and important resource.”

Dr. Donald A.B. Lindberg, Director of the National Library of Medicine said: 

"The importance of this archive is realized every day - our studies show that researchers and authors whose articles appear in PubMed Central are read and cited hundreds of times more than they were in their original print format. PubMed Central has greatly benefited from the journal content and funding contributions made possible by the Wellcome Library and JISC."

The backfiles archive can be accessed free of charge through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), full-text, life sciences repository PubMed Central (PMC). Journals will be added to the archive as soon as they are digitised. PubMed citations are added to that database when the archive is complete.

Further information about this project can be found at: Medical Journals Backile Project 

This project is one of six digitisation projects being managed by JISC with funding from HEFCE (Higher Education Funding Council for England). The JISC programme represents a total investment of some £10m in the digitisation of high-quality online content, including sound, moving pictures, newspapers, census data, journals and parliamentary papers for use by the UK further and higher education communities.

See further information about the JISC digitisation programme.

Media enquiries

Philip Pothen (JISC)
Vivien Goldsmith (Wellcome Trust) 020 7611 8364 or 8866

Notes for editors

1. The full list of participating journals*:

Anesthesia Progress - 1954
Annals of Surgery - 1885
Annals of the Royal College of Surgeons of England - 1947
Biochemical Journal - 1906
BMJ - British Medical Journal - 1853
British Journal of Cancer - 1947
British Journal of Clinical Pharmacology - 1974
British Journal of General Practice - 1952
British Journal of Pharmacology - 1946
Clinical & Experimental Immunology - 1966
Epidemiology and Infection - 1901
Immunology - 1958
International Journal of Experimental Pathology - 1920
Journal of Anatomy - 1866
Journal of Physiology - 1878
Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine - 1809
Medical History - 1957

* Current journal name – some journals have had several name changes

In addition to the journals being digitized under this project, the NLM is also digitising additional journals, including the Journal of Clinical Investigation, Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences and the EMBO Journal

2. JISC – the Joint Information Systems Committee – is a joint committee of the UK further and higher education funding bodies and is responsible for supporting the innovative use of information and communication technology (ICT) to support learning, teaching, and research.  It is best known for providing the JANET network, a range of support, content and advisory services, and a portfolio of high-quality resources. 

3. The Wellcome Trust is the most diverse biomedical research charity in the world, spending about £450 million every year both in the UK and internationally to support and promote research that will improve the health of humans and animals. The Trust was established under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome, and is funded from a private endowment, which is managed with long-term stability and growth in mind.

The Wellcome Library is one of the world's greatest collections for the study of the history of medicine.  The print, manuscript audio, film, pictorial and digital collections are a national treasure and an unrivalled intellectual resource.  See: Wellcome Library 

The Wellcome Trust was awarded the first SPARC Europe Award for Outstanding Achievements in Scholarly Communications by SPARC Europe (Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition), for its work on open access. SPARC Europe represents over 100 European research-led university libraries from 14 European countries.

4. National Library of Medicine (NLM), on the campus of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, is the world's largest medical library. The Library collects materials in all areas of biomedicine and health care, as well as works on biomedical aspects of technology, the humanities, and the physical, life, and social sciences. The collections stand at more than 8 million items--books, journals, technical reports, manuscripts, microfilms, photographs and images. Housed within the Library is one of the world's finest medical history collections of old and rare medical works. The Library's collection may be consulted in the reading room or requested on interlibrary loan.

For 125 years, the Library published the Index Medicus®, a monthly subject/author guide to articles in 4000 journals. This information, and much more, is today available in PubMed®, freely accessible via the World Wide Web.  PubMed has more than 16 million MEDLINE journal article references and abstracts going back to the mid-1960s with another 1.5 million references back to the early 1950s. Additional citations are being added from the back files of journals scanned for PubMed Central.