Exciting! NLM and Wellcome Library Establish Agreement to Make 150 Years of Biomedical Journals Freely Available Online

From the National Library of Medicine:

Representatives of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the Wellcome Trust recently signed a memorandum of understanding to work together to make thousands of complete back issues of historically-significant biomedical journals freely available online.
The terms of the MOU include a donation of £750,000 ($1.2 million) to the NLM that will support coordination of the three-year project to scan original materials from NLM’s collection at the article level, and Wellcome’s work to secure copyright clearances and permissions for electronic deposit from publishers. NLM will undertake conservation of the original material to ensure its preservation for future generations.
NLM is authorized to accept donations in support of its mission.
Key journals charting the development of modern medicine over the last 150 years will be digitized in their entirety and made available on the National Institutes of Health life sciences repository PubMed Central (PMC) and its European counterpart, Europe PMC. The project builds on the Medical Journal Backfiles Digitization Project (2004-2010) and will contribute substantially to the current PMC archive of over 3 million articles from medical journals.
Part of the project will concentrate on mental health journals, supporting a major archive digitization program also being undertaken by the Wellcome Trust. Journals to be digitized include Mental Health, Mental Hygiene, and the Journal of Psychological Medicine and Mental Pathology. Other journals have been selected for their general relevance, such as the Indian Medical Gazette, the British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review and the Transactions of the Epidemiology Society of London.
Donald A.B. Lindberg, Director of the NLM, said “This is a wonderful step forward in our continuing partnership with the Wellcome Trust to preserve and make freely available important biomedical literature for research, education, and learning. It is an example of a truly useful collaboration, and NLM is grateful to the Wellcome for its generosity.”
[Clip]
In addition to images and searchable text, NLM will also create article-level citations for PubMed. Digitization is expected to start in late 2014 and to be completed by 2017. Material will be added to PMC and Europe PMC as it is digitized.

Read the Complete Announcement
See Also: JISC and Wellcome Library Sign New Three Year Agreement and Plan to Digitize 10 Million Pages of Historical Medical Books (March 25, 2014)

Filed under: Companies (Publishers/Vendors), Digital Preservation, Libraries, National Libraries, News, Preservation