Published 29 April 2009, doi:10.1136/bmj.b1744
Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1744
Editorials
The new BMJ online archive
A single search can find any article published in the BMJ since 1840
Every BMJ article published since the journal’s first issue in October 1840 is now available online from bmj.com. This was achieved by digitally scanning 824 183 pages of the print journal. It cost about $1 (£0.68; 
0.76) a page and was made possible by the extraordinary generosity of the US National Library of Medicine (NLM) and the United Kingdom’s Wellcome Trust and Joint Information Systems Committee.
The journey began in 2000, when the BMJ announced it would be the first general medical journal to sign up with PubMed Central.1 This project, to create a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature, was masterminded by the US National Center for Biotechnology Information under the aegis of the NLM.2 Three years later, the NLM offered to digitise the archival content of publishers participating in PubMed Central to create complete digital archives of their journals. In return for permanent rights to archive and distribute the material freely through PubMed Central, the library offered to fund the cost of cover to cover scanning back to a journal’s first issue.3 The BMJ leapt at the prospect—which included the back issue digitisation of 18 of the BMJ Group’s specialist journals (among them Heart, Gut, and Thorax).
The next phase of the project was to round up complete runs of the group’s journals. This was by far the most difficult for the BMJ, which started life as the Provincial Medical and Surgical Journal and didn’t settle on its current title until 1857.4 Much of the archive came to the NLM from the Medical Center Library in New York, which closed in 2003. We are particularly indebted to the Health Sciences Libraries of the University of Michigan, which gave up their rare early copies for digitisation.
The problems of sourcing early journals paled into insignificance when compared with the problems of scanning the articles from thin friable paper. Such paper allowed substantial "bleed through" during scanning, if it hadn’t already bunched up or torn. As a result, many pages had to be scanned manually rather than by a high speed scanner. Another headache was the hyperactive renaming and reordering of journal sections—a constant feature of the journal’s 169 years of innovation.
Each issue was scanned cover to cover, and PDF files of the original pages were created for every article. In addition, separate high resolution images were prepared for all illustrations.
Optical character recognition was used to create XML files for each article, which allows full text searching. Early into the project, progress was slower and costs were higher than had been envisaged. At this point, the Wellcome Trust and the Joint Information Systems Committee—both fervent supporters of freeing up access to the results of scientific research—split the bill with the US taxpayer, who had until then been picking up the tab.
In November 2008, the last BMJ was loaded on to PubMed Central, which means that the archive is available from there too. Last month the archive was loaded on to bmj.com; the archival material is integrated fully within bmj.com and shares the same functionality as more recently added content. Articles from the archive can be searched for, just like any other article, and old issues of the journal can be browsed from the journal’s print issue archive. The BMJ Group and our online host, HighWire Press, shared the costs of this phase of the operation.
When we began our association with PubMed Central, all BMJ content was accessible from PubMed Central’s website on the day of publication, without charge (matching the access conditions on bmj.com). From January 2006, the BMJ stopped providing free online access to its non-research articles (editorials, news, features, letters, analysis, education, shortcuts, reviews, obituaries, Minerva). However, research articles remain free to access from the day of publication at bmj.com and PubMed Central. This means that the BMJ meets the requirements of the growing number of funding agencies that mandate free access to reports of the research they fund. On PubMed Central, all non-research articles from 1840 until April 2006 are available free, without registration. On bmj.com, all non-research articles published during this time period are available free but require registration (see figure
).
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However it is accessed, the entire BMJ archive opens up a wealth of possibilities. On the basis of a single search, researchers will now be able to locate any article ever published in the BMJ. Although this will solve a frequently expressed frustration with bmj.com, we believe that the availability of the entire archive offers something qualitatively different to just a full set of articles. In fact, we are so convinced of this that we are offering a prize of £1000 for the most interesting use of the archive (see the journal for further details of this competition).
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For an introduction to the archive, watch a series of specially commissioned videos, featuring the former head of Britain’s Medical Research Council, Colin Blakemore, that focus on some of the important subjects and people that have appeared in the journal’s pages.5 And over the next year, keep an eye out for extracts from some of our key articles, which will be headlined, "From our archive." Meet John Snow, David Livingstone, Joseph Lister, Arthur Conan Doyle, Florence Nightingale, William Osler, Richard Doll, Alice Stewart, Amartya Sen, and Joseph Stiglitz—if you missed them the first time around.
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Cite this as: BMJ 2009;338:b1744
Tony Delamothe, deputy editor
1 BMJ, London WC1H 9JR
Competing interests: None declared.
Provenance and peer review: Commissioned; not externally peer reviewed.
References
- Delamothe T. BMJset to sign with PubMed Central, JSTOR, and WorldSpace. BMJ 2000;320:8.
[Free Full Text] - PubMed Central. PMC overview. 2008. www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/intro.html.
- PubMed Central National Advisory Committee. Summary minutes of meeting, 16 January 2003., www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/pmcdoc/mins-jan2003.pdf.
- Bartrip PWJ. Mirror of medicine: a history of the BMJ. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990.
- BMJ video. http://www.bmj.com/video/.
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- BMJ set to sign with PubMed Central, JSTOR, and WorldSpace
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bmj.com, 5 May 2009 [Full text] - Re: Re: Recalling and Processing Memory
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