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

[Michael Friedman]

Hey - they finally released that Press Release! Now I can talk about it...
(The disadvantages of working in a business/competitive environment. :( )

I sure hope that having the most free articles becomes a competition,
but who can tell. HighWire sees it as an advantage in two ways: as great
advertising for our services to publishers and readers, and as an
interesting competition with our competitors, PubMed Central and
Elsevier, Ovid, etc. 

As for our growth rate, what with adding new journals (we're up to 170,
I think) and bringing back issues online (like more back content for
PNAS, thanks to JSTOR, who's actually doing that work), so far we've
been at least doubling every year. Not all of that is free,
unfortunately, but we're pushing our publishers hard to make as much
free as possible. We don't think we're going to pass NASA ADS anytime
soon, though.

Now, here's the best news: as the press release indicates, we think of
all of our journals' free content as one big, giant archive. We are
thinking of making an Open Archives server for all that content. Thus,
like arXiv, all 139,000+ articles would be available to OA protocol
based services. First, though, we would need to get the permission of
all of our client publishers...  Nothing is probably going to happen
until after sometime this summer, when I get ClinMed Netprints OA server
up and running, but watch this space. :)

-- Michael Friedman

Paul Ginsparg wrote:
> 
> 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
> 
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