JISC

Overview

The Medical journal backfiles project will deliver around 2 million pages of text, derived by digitising the complete back files from a number of historically significant medical journals. This project will deliver around 2 million pages of text, derived by digitising the complete backfiles from a number of historically significant medical journals. All digitised content will be made freely available through PubMed Central. This project is jointly funded by JISC and the Wellcome Trust, who are working with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the USA.

It isn’t just the archive, however, that we intend to make freely available – but also current and future issues published by participating publishers. Wellcome and JISC have agreed to fund the backfile conversion and in return the publishers (as a condition of participation) have to deposit their current issues into the PubMed Central archive. Research articles deposited within PubMed Central must be made available for free within 24 months of publication, whilst all other content, such as editorials, letters, or reviews, must be made available within three years.

The project

A selection of medical journals, some dating back to the early 19th century, will be made available online. Over a million articles from two million pages will eventually be accessible to everyone through standard search engines such as Google and, for the specialist researcher, the PubMed database.

World-changing finds and life-changing discoveries are included, from Sir Alexander Fleming’s discovery of the use of penicillin to fight bacterial infections to Thomas Hodgkin’s classic description of lymphadenoma (later termed Hodgkin’s disease). Many of the articles in Medical Journals Backfiles fall outside the year range for PubMed, which does not have online indexing and citation information before 1965. For those articles, new xml citations are being created and added to PubMed Central.

Just as significant is the decision for the resource to operate on the open access model, whereby participating publishers deposit current issues of their journals, after a short embargo period, into the archive for permanent, free access.

Open access is supported by JISC, the Wellcome Trust and participating publishers as a viable and ethical way to disseminate research findings, and the model adopted means Medical Backfiles will run in perpetuity as current issues of an increasing number of publications are added to grow the resource and bring it constantly up to date.

Some journals in this selection were first published in the 19th century; indeed, the first edition of the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine appeared in 1809. Moreover, the milestones recorded over these two centuries have not necessarily been eclipsed by subsequent and current research; for example, in order to understand the recent MMR scare, researchers can turn to the literature of the 1940s and 1950s which contains a wealth of discussion surrounding autism.

The content

This will deliver the complete backfiles of high impact UK and US medical journals. See journals committed to the project.

The process

The digitisation aspect is being managed in the USA by the NLM. The project aims for ‘faithful digitisation’ whereby journals are scanned from cover to cover, including tables of contents, ‘prelims’ and advertisements. Paper copies are de-spined and fed through a sheet-feeder, and the process results in the creation of Portable Document Format (PDF) versions of articles (for display) and XML citations (to ensure consistency of presentation and indexing). A stringent quality assurance process of random checks ensures a high degree of accuracy. The NLM’s archiving template for XML documents – its ‘Document Type Definition (DTD)’ – is effectively becoming the standard for medical publishing, with publishers preparing new material in a format which conforms automatically to the requirements of the digital resource.

The future

Several journals, spanning a range of sub-disciplines, will be digitised by November 2005 when the project receives its official launch. Beyond this date, journals will be added progressively as more sign up to the project and each is subsequently scanned. The model is effectively self-sustaining with NLM taking responsibility for its maintenance beyond the official completion in 2007. These resources will be fully available through PubMed Central.