Thomas Söderqvist Good news for historians of medicine, viz., we are now having free online access to back issues of a number of biomedical journals at http://www.pubmedcentral.gov
Here’s a excerpt from the press release from Wellcome Trust:
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 to the archive free to anyone through standard search tools such as PubMed and Google.
The initiative was developed through a partnership between the Wellcome Trust, JISC (Joint Information Systems Committee), the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and a number of medical journal publishers.
[…]
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.
[…]
The backfiles archive can be accessed free of charge through the National Institutes of Health (NIH), full-text, life sciences repository PubMed Central (PMC) http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/. Journals will be added to the archive as soon as they are digitized. PubMed citations are added to that database when the archive is complete
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Further information about this project can be found at http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/backfiles
(thanks to Jette Nielsen at the Wellcome Library for keeping us up-to-date)
