Summer 2006

From the Chair

Science in school

How to communicate for business success

Science communication -the African way

Low cost media training

Free access medical journals

Stempra newsletter

Free online access to medical journals

In May the Medical Backfiles Digitisation project was launched at the Wellcome Trust’s head office in London. Thanks to £1.25 million worth of funding from the Wellcome Trust and JISC, around 2 million pages from the complete backfiles of a number of historically significant medical journals have been digitised. All digitised content will be made freely available through PubMed Central (www.pubmedcentral.gov). 

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. This project is jointly funded by JISC and the Wellcome Trust, who are working with the National Library of Medicine (NLM) in the USA.

For further information: http://library.wellcome.ac.uk/node280.html

Christine Worthley
Christina@Coverpoint.net

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