JISC

JISC agreement with Oxford University Press brings 135 years of scholarly resources online

6th June 2006. An archive totaling over 3 million pages from 300,000 journal articles and encompassing over 135 years of human knowledge is being made available free of charge to the UK academic community in perpetuity.

JISC and Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, today announced an agreement which will see major collections of journal articles in the humanities, sciences, medicine, law and the social sciences made available to all higher education institutions, collections which include many of the leading titles in their fields over the last two centuries. The archive, if purchased individually, would cost in the region of £80,000 per institution.

The agreement represents a significant commitment to the widening of access to major scholarly resources and follows a programme of digitization undertaken by Oxford Journals. Functionality incorporated by the archive includes full text pdfs of each article with HTML headers and abstracts, full text searching, the inclusion of all images and graphics, and links to 'similar articles in this journal'.

Lorraine Estelle, JISC Collections Team Manager, said:

“This agreement makes available a wide range of complete runs of journals to far more students and staff than would otherwise be able to access them. The response we received from the community during the consultation process was extremely enthusiastic and thanks to their support, JISC is delighted with this opportunity to work with Oxford University Press on an agreement which will help to enrich teaching, learning and research across a range of subjects.” 

Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Oxford Journals, commented: “This agreement with JISC is a major boost towards ensuring scholarly research is accessible for the future. With content from 140 titles dating back to 1849, the Oxford Journals archive makes available important knowledge that may previously have been hard to find, or was not accessible at all. We’re delighted that JISC is enabling UK researchers to benefit from this significant collection.”

Liz Chapman, Deputy Director of UCL Library Services, said: “Accessing this archive is like walking through The Looking Glass into another era. Here we are given the ability to make a systematic review of early research articles in a variety of subjects. Here television is new and is early criticized and clinical trials are executed by doctors on themselves. It is a marvellous adjunct to current e-journals and will support research in many areas, particularly the humanities and social sciences which have up to now had little historical digital material to search.”

Further information

JISC/OUP agreement, see JISC Collections website. 

Access the archive, at Oxford Journals Digital Archive

For further information, please contact: Philip Pothen (JISC) or Mithu Mukherjee (Oxford Journals) on +44(0)1865 354471 or mithu.mukherjee@oxfordjournals.org

Notes for editors

1. 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. See information about JISC, its services and programmes.
2. Oxford University Press (OUP), a department of the University of Oxford, is the world's largest and most international university press. Founded in 1478, it currently publishes more than 4,500 new books a year, has a presence in over fifty countries, and employs some 3,700 people worldwide. It has become familiar to millions through a diverse publishing programme that includes scholarly works in all academic disciplines, bibles, music, school and college textbooks, children's books, materials for teaching English as a foreign language, business books, dictionaries and reference books, and journals. Read more about OUP
3. Oxford Journals, a Division of OUP, publishes over 180 journals covering a broad range of subject areas, two-thirds of which are published in collaboration with learned societies and other international organizations. The collection contains some of the world's most prestigious titles, including JNCI (Journal of the National Cancer Institute), Brain, Human Reproduction, English Historical Review, and the Review of Financial Studies. Read more about Oxford Journals