- © 2007 Canadian Medical Association or its licensors
Thousands of hard-to-find back issues of CMAJ and other journals, including one dating to 1865, are now available online thanks to the 4-year-old digitization project at PubMed Central (PMC), the giant online resource at the US National Library of Medicine (NLM).
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The project (www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/fprender.fcgi) means that hundreds of copies of CMAJ, including every issue published between the journal's launch in January 1911 and September 1940, are already available, as are issues from 1944 to 1950, 1979 to 1981 and 1984 to 1998. Scanning to put the remaining issues into portable document format (PDF) is ongoing, but will not be required for CMAJ issues published since 1999, the year the journal's full text was made available online (www.cmaj.ca).
The cost is being borne by the NLM, the Wellcome Trust and the UK Joint Information Systems Committee. Digitization is available only to the 299 journals that deposit their material under open-access agreements with PMC, the online database of full-text biomedical and life-science literature.
The site attracted 3.1 million unique users in November 2006 alone, when 12.5 million abstracts, full-text articles and PDFs were retrieved. PubMed Central's production team leader, Carol Myers, said more than 905 000 articles are now available at PubMed Central, including 548 000 scanned articles.
“The CMA was one of the first publishers to sign on as a PMC participant,” she says. “The original agreement for digitization was signed in 2003 and the first batches of [scanned] material began to come in from our contractor in 2004.”
She said the scanning is an “ongoing and open-ended project.” The oldest scanned journal is the Transactions of the American Ophthalmological Society, first published in 1865, followed by the Journal of Anatomy and Physiology (now the Journal of Anatomy) in 1867; CMAJ (1911) shares the rank of sixth oldest scanned journal with the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association.
Myers said about 30 000 of the original 182 000 pages received from publishers remain to be scanned. “We hope to have the archive completed in the next couple of months.”
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CMAJ Editor-in-Chief Paul Hébert thinks the online availability of early volumes of CMAJ and other journals will encourage physicians to discover more about medicine's past.
“I just read one of our editorials from 1911 that stated: ‚The Journal is not a great sheet which comes down from heaven: it is an instrument of the profession to be used by all in the interests of all.' I couldn't have said it better myself.”