The 68 clinical, scientific and scholarly publishers that constitute the DC Principles for Free Access to Science Coalition today applauded the announcement by Stanford University’s HighWire Press that its one millionth free article has been made available online to the public. These articles can be accessed at http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl. HighWire Press, an enterprise of Stanford’s libraries, was launched in 1995 to create Internet versions of high-impact research published in scholarly journals. Beginning with online access to one journal, the program has grown dramatically and now provides access to 878 journals in the spheres of science, social science and the humanities. The journals are produced by 145 publishers, the vast majority of which are not-for-profit society publishers and university presses. HighWire is visited by 17 million readers each month, logging 1.5 billion hits. These readers conduct 10 million searches and download 56 million full-text articles on a monthly basis. The more than one million free full-text articles available to non-subscribers come from over 230 journals by publishers who participate in HighWire’s Free Back Issues program.Lenne Miller, Senior Director, Publications for The Endocrine Society, remarked on this achievement, “HighWire is posting 450 new articles to the site each day, and 10,000 additional articles are being offered at no charge each month.” He concludes, “More scholarly research is now available to more people than ever before."The nonprofit publishers comprising the DC Principles Coalition (http://www.DCPrinciples.org) are among those who offer their content to the public through the site. Martin Frank, Ph.D., Executive Director of the American Physiological Society (APS) and a member of the Coalition says, “HighWire Press has achieved a milestone never before reached in electronic or scholarly publishing,” referring to the one million no-charge research articles now available to the public. “To appreciate the magnitude of what is now available, consider the fact that it would take an individual reading one title every five seconds nearly two months to read just the titles.” HighWire’s announcement comes at a time when the National Institutes of Health (NIH) is implementing a policy requesting NIH-funded researchers to submit their work to the agency once a research article has been accepted for journal publication. The articles are then made available to the public at a cost of millions of taxpayer dollars per year. The Coalition has frequently questioned the value of funding a duplicative federal program at a time of record-breaking deficits.According to Frank, the members of the DC Principles Coalition will continue working with HighWire Press to expand the range and depth of science being made available to the public at no charge.
