15 May 2006

Full back issues of historically significant biomedical journals, some as far back as the 1800s, will be accessible on the Internet for free.

This is down to a journal archive initiative by the Wellcome Trust, the Joint Information Systems Committee, the US National Library of Medicine and a number of medical journal publishers.

They have put together a system to enable people to access a wide range and large number of journals through search tools like Google and PubMed.

These include Sir Alexander Fleming's research on using penicillin to combat bacterial infections, the paper from Hodgkin and Huxley on the effects of nerve impulses which won a Nobel Prize and a study by Sir Richard Doll that showed how smoking is a large factor in developing lung cancer.

In addition, these archives provide high resolution images, links from the original journal to corrections and other changes, links from references to full text and they allow researchers to carry out a full text search across the whole archive.

Publishers involved in the project will add their future work to the archive after an embargo period, a maximum of one year for all research papers.

The director of the Wellcome Trust, Dr Mark Walport, said: "This growing collection will be of lasting benefit to researchers, practitioners and medical historians worldwide."

© Adfero Ltd

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