Publisher Digitisation Service

The British Library has just launched its Publisher Digitisation Service (see link above), which, it says, is the first fully integrated journals digitization service on the market. One of the greatest challenges for a publisher undertaking a digitization of its archives is finding content — one publisher had to locate 75% of the content for its programme from third parties. The British Library has an unrivalled collection of serial content and is aiming to save publishers time and money in locating material and providing it in online, searchable format. At the webpage linked to above are more details of the service, and a link to a downloadable PDF of the white paper ‘Journal backfiles in scientific publishing.’

All the Nature journals have searchable online archives back to issue 1 available via each journal’s website, except for the oldest, Nature. Nature’s online, searchable archive currently extends back to 1950 but will be complete to issue 1 (4 November 1869) by the end of this year. In the meantime, the first issue of the journal is available online at the “about the journal” page of the Nature website.