Jacso's cheers and jeers for 2002

The following is my annual year-end roundup of the best and worst digital archives. These archives are the backbones of digital libraries, growing ever larger and more sophisticated. There are some exceptions, of course.

CHEERS for the ...

* Best bioscience archive of multiple publishers-HighWire

Press (HWP). It is used for digitizing nearly 350 serials, including the most cited ones in bioscience and medicine. There are also several science journals in the HWP stable, along with a few social science journals. The abstracts (when published with the articles) are accessible-free of charge to anyone-for all of the HWP-hosted journals. In addition, all the digital issues of 16 high-impact-factor journals are also free for any user.

At HighWire Press, more than 120 other journals have substantial years of back issues free of charge-- except for the most recent 6-12 months. A few have shorter or longer embargo periods, such as Genetics (3 months) or Radiology (2 years). This free journal article subset in Adobe PDF and HTML (with hyperlinks to many cited and citing articles) is highly significant, not only because of the volume (500,000 articles) but because of the clout of most of the journals. An additional set of 200-plus journals is available for subscribers, while nonsubscribers can use very reasonable pay-per-view services for the majority of these titles.