Access to the Oxford Journal Archive will be available to University of Cambridge users once the licence agreement, which has just been completed, has been processed. The Oxford Journals Digital Archive, launched in April of this year, provides access to all journal content from volume one, issue one, until the end of 1995 for over 140 journals.
It follows a digitisation programme undertaken by Oxford Journals, which is a division of Oxford University Press. The archive is seen to serve as an adjunct to current e-journals, supporting research in many areas, particularly the humanities and social sciences which have, up to now, had little historical digital material to search. The archive, with 300,000 journal articles dating back to 135 years, covers topics in the humanities, sciences, medicine, law and the social sciences.
The list includes many titles not previously available electronically within the university and for a proportion of titles the addition of the archive provides access to a complete run of issues to date. The collection covers the sciences, medicine, humanities and social sciences and is the most significant addition to date to the list of electronic journal backfiles in humanities and social sciences.
All titles have been added to the ejournals@cambridge portal and will be added within a month to the University’s online Newton catalogue.
PRESS RELEASE FROM JISC
Major journals archive made available free to UK universities
JISC agreement with Oxford University Press brings 135 years of scholarly resources online.
6th June 2006. An archive totalling over 3 million pages from 300,000 journal articles and encompassing over 135 years of human knowledge is being made available free of charge to the UK academic community in perpetuity.
JISC and Oxford Journals, a division of Oxford University Press, today announced an agreement which will see major collections of journal articles in the humanities, sciences, medicine, law and the social sciences made available to all higher education institutions, collections which include many of the leading titles in their fields over the last two centuries. The archive, if purchased individually, would cost in the region of £80,000 per institution.
The agreement represents a significant commitment to the widening of access to major scholarly resources and follows a programme of digitization undertaken by Oxford Journals. Functionality incorporated by the archive includes full text pdfs of each article with HTML headers and abstracts, full text searching, the inclusion of all images and graphics, and links to ’similar articles in this journal’.
Lorraine Estelle, JISC Collections Team Manager, said: “This agreement makes available a wide range of complete runs of journals to far more students and staff than would otherwise be able to access them. The response we received from the community during the consultation process was extremely enthusiastic and thanks to their support, JISC is delighted with this opportunity to work with Oxford University Press on an agreement which will help to enrich teaching, learning and research across a range of subjects.”
Martin Richardson, Managing Director, Oxford Journals, commented: “This agreement with JISC is a major boost towards ensuring scholarly research is accessible for the future. With content from 140 titles dating back to 1849, the Oxford Journals archive makes available important knowledge that may previously have been hard to find, or was not accessible at all. We’re delighted that JISC is enabling UK researchers to benefit from this significant collection.”
Liz Chapman, Deputy Director of UCL Library Services, said: “Accessing this archive is like walking through The Looking Glass into another era. Here we are given the ability to make a systematic review of early research articles in a variety of subjects. Here television is new and is early criticized and clinical trials are executed by doctors on themselves. It is a marvellous adjunct to current e-journals and will support research in many areas, particularly the humanities and social sciences which have up to now had little historical digital material to search.”
A complete list of available titles, with dates of coverage, is available at Oxford Journal Archive.