Medical History – entire archive freely available online

The first complete archive of a medical history journal has been deposited into PubMed Central, as part of a £1.25 million programme led by the Wellcome Trust, Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and the US National Library of Medicine (NLM).

The back catalogue of the journal Medical History has been digitised and deposited in the archive as part of a process to deliver free access to historically significant medical journals. The project partners are taking the next step of their programme to digitise the back catalogues of 12 additional journals, including the Biochemical Journal, the Journal of Physiology, the Journal of Anatomy, the Journal of the Royal Society of Medicine and the British Journal of General Practice. In total the project will deliver free access to over 2 million pages of peer reviewed articles.

In addition to the digitization of the back catalogue, all future issues of Medical History will be made freely available online at the time of publication.

This project supports the Wellcome Trust’s position of supporting open access to scientific literature, and complements the ongoing work to establish a UK PubMed Central.

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

“The digitised contents of Medical History are an excellent addition to PubMed Central, which has become an invaluable world-wide resource for researchers, clinicians, and medical historians”.

Professor Hal Cook, Director of the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at UCL and co-editor of Medical History, said:

“We are very pleased to be the first journal in our field to be fully and freely accessible over the web.It is hoped that in making Medical History more widely available and easy to use, it will also make it of increasing interest to both readers and potential authors.”

ENDS

Media contacts:

Mark Anderson – 020 7611 8612

m.anderson@wellcome.ac.uk

Notes to Editors

1. Medical History, published by the Wellcome Trust Centre for the History of Medicine at University College London, is devoted to all aspects of the history of medicine, although its primary concern is with the evolution of scientific and social concepts in medicine, as well as with the many disciplines such as economics, ethnology, literature, philosophy, politics, theology, science and technology that impact upon it. The journal’s concern is to broaden and deepen the understanding of medicine, in the widest sense, by historical studies of the highest quality.

2. The Wellcome Trust is an independent, research funding charity, established under the will of Sir Henry Wellcome in 1936. The Trust’s mission is to foster and promote research with the aim of improving human and animal health

3. Located in Bethesda, Maryland, the U.S. National Library of Medicine, the world's largest library of the health sciences, is a component of the National Institutes of Health, Department of Health & Human Services.

4. The JISC – Joint Information Systems Committee – is a committee of all 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.

5. The complete archive of Medical History can be found at: http://www.pubmedcentral.gov/

6. Further information on this project, including a list of titles which have agreed to participate in this project) can be found at: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/backfiles