National Library of Medicine and Wellcome Complete Partnership to Provide Free Access to Hundreds of Years of Medical Research, Over 650,000 Digitized Pages, Tens of Thousands of Individual Articles Available

From the National Library of Medicine:

The National Library of Medicine (NLM) and Wellcome have completed their partnership to make thousands of full back issues of historically-significant biomedical journals freely available through the National Institutes of Health life sciences repository PubMed Central (PMC), and through its European counterpart, Europe PMC.

[Our emphasis] The NLM and Wellcome are pleased to report that over two dozen additional titles are now freely available, spanning three centuries and encompassing hundreds of thousands of pages. In total, the collaboration has grown PMC by over 650,000 pages and tens of thousands of individual articles.

These newly-available titles are free to read, download, text mine, and re-use via the PMC Text Mining Collections, which includes the PMC Open Access Subset and the Historical OCR Collection. License terms vary by title; see PMC Back Issue Digitization for more details.

Alongside the previously-announced sixteen titles, the new available titles include:

• Glasgow Medical Journal, which began publication in 1828. The archive for this journal includes:
  • Glasgow Medical Journal (1828-1955)
  • Transactions. Medico-Chirurgical Society of Edinburgh (1824-1922)
  • Transactions. Edinburgh Obstetrical Society (1870-1939)
  • Edinburgh Medical Journal (1855-1954)
  • Monthly Journal of Medicine (1855)
  • Monthly Journal of Medical Science (1846-1854)
  • London and Edinburgh Monthly Journal of Medical Science (1842-1845)
  • Edinburgh Medical and Surgical Journal (1805-1855)
  • Annals of Medicine, For the Year … (1796-1804)

• Hospital, which began publication in 1886. The archive for this journal includes:
  • Hospital (1886-1921)
  • Hospital and Health Review (1921-1924)

• London Medical Journal, which began publishing in 1781. The archive for this journal includes:
  • London Medical Journal (1781-1790)
  • Medical Facts and Observations (1791-1800)

• British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review , which began publishing in 1848. The archive for this journal includes:
  • British and Foreign Medico-Chirurgical Review (1848-1877)
  • British and Foreign Medical Review (1836-1848)
  • Medical Quarterly Review (1833-1835)
  • London Medical and Physical Journal (1815-1833)
  • Medical and Physical Journal (1799-1814)

• The Medico-Chirurgical Review, which began publishing in 1824. The archive for this journal includes:
  • Medico-Chirurgical Review (1824-1847)
  • Medico-Chirurgical Review and Journal of Medical Science. Analytical Series (1820-1824)
  • Medico-Chirurgical Journal (1818-1820)
  • Medico-Chirurgical Journal and Review (1816-1818)

• Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London, which began publishing in 1860. The archive for this journal includes:
  • Transactions of the Epidemiological Society of London (1860-1907)
  • The Sanitary Review and Journal of Public Health (1857-1859)
  • Journal of Public Health, and Sanitary Review (1855-1857)

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The collaboration to make these titles and others publicly available stems from a 2014 memorandum of understanding (MOU) to work together in this important way for the benefit of research and education.

This 2014 partnership builds on the Medical Journal Backfiles Digitization Project of 2004-2010 and contributes to the current PMC archive of over 5.3 million articles from medical journals.

Read the Complete Annoumcement

Filed under: Digital Preservation, Libraries, National Libraries, News, Open Access, Publishing