[UPS] RE: free online access to 137,000+ science articles

[Paul Ginsparg]

for those who hadn't noticed the highwire press release a few days ago
"HighWire Press publishers offer more than 137,000 free online articles" see
http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/00/000301highwire.html grandly proclaiming
itself "one of the 2 largest FREE full-text science archives on Earth"

this could be an edifying competition, if having the most FREE articles becomes
a selling point (perhaps Michael Friedman could estimate for us what their
expected growth rate in new free articles/per year will be). this direction for
them may not be entirely unrelated to the NIH "PubMedCentral" initiative, in
which highwire is also participating. (by some remarkable coincidence, i'm on
the "PubMedCentral national advisory board" and am hoping to point them to some
interoperable protocols at a meeting later this month.)

also see http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl for their participating
journals, and see http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/largest.dtl for some of

 Earth's Largest Free Full-Text Science Archives

 1.The NASA Astrophysics Data System -- over 300,000 free full-text articles.
  The Astrophysics Data System (ADS) is a NASA-funded project that provides
  free access to the full text of articles in astronomy and astrophysics. Most
  of the major astronomical journals are included. In many cases articles
  published in the current year are not available through ADS. Articles are
  available in PDF, GIF, or other electronic formats.

 2.HighWire Press -- 139,512 free full-text articles as of 3/5/00.
  HighWire Press at Stanford University develops and maintains the Web versions
  of important journals in biomedicine and other disciplines. A list of
  journals with free full-text articles online is available.

 The rest of this list is presented alphabetically: 

  arXiv.org (formerly xxx.lanl.gov) is a fully automated electronic archive and
  distribution server for research papers. Covered areas include physics and
  related disciplines, mathematics, nonlinear sciences, computational
  linguistics, and neuroscience. Both preprints and published papers are
  available.

 ...

(at the current 125,500 , arXiv.org is probably ranked 3rd not only on Earth,
but in the entire solar system..., then they mention 11 others)

pg