Paris

Eighty-three life sciences journals will make their back issues — representing more than 137,000 articles — free on the web through High Wire Press.

HighWire Press is a not-for-profit outfit set up in 1995 by Stanford University Libraries and Academic Information Resources to help universities and societies to publish on the web at low cost.

This new agreement with the 83 journals makes HighWire the world's second-largest scientific repository, after the US space agency NASA's Astrophysics Data System. It already dwarfs the nascent PubMed Central (PMC) initiative that has been set up by the US National Institutes of Health — whose goal is to create a free global website for the entire life sciences literature (see Nature 401, 6; 1999, Nature 401, 626 ; 1999).

PMC went live last month, but has so far attracted only a handful of publishers, many of whose back issues are also available from HighWire, such as Molecular Biology of the Cell and Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS).

Most journals taking part in the HighWire scheme will make their content free one or two years after print publication (see http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl ) and frequently also on a trial basis. But PNAS is making its content freely available one month after print publication, and Molecular Biology of the Cell after two.

David Lipman, director of the National Center for Biotechnology Information at the NIH and one of the main architects of PMC, puts a brave face on this situation.

The HighWire initiative is “a great thing”, he says. “It shows in principle that journals are willing to make back content free and therefore should be willing to take part in PMC.

“Our goal is to provide free access for all life sciences. HighWire can only do it for journals that are paying them.”

But some editors are already questioning the need for PMC. Ira Mellman, editor-in-chief of The Journal of Cell Biology, which is making its back issues free on HighWire after 18 months, says: “Allowing journals and publishers to select their own host sites makes more sense than trying to enforce a common solution on all.”

Another journal editor adds: “Virtually everything they have proposed in this regard has been developed by Highwire and other commercial sites. Free access is already provided to literally anyone at an academic or commercial institution.”

HighWire's publisher, Michael Keller, says he intends “to expand the coverage of our disciplines”.

Momentum for making past content freely available is growing, Keller claims. “The success of the free back issues effort will be so considerable that many publishers will want to go in that direction to achieve that social goal,” he says.