FILE THIS: Free Full-text Science Journals

January 16, 2006

Hi All, & Janet,

RE FREE access to FULL-TEXT science journals online:

1. Most universities and large research organisations pay for integrated

library (and digital full-text) facilities. Private practitioners who have a

good friend/colleague in such organisations may be able to source full-

text articles free via such a friend.

2. Another option is to use HIGHWIRE PRESS. " HighWire Press is the

largest archive of free full-text science on Earth! As of 1/15/06, we are

assisting in the online publication of 1,149,154 free full-text articles and

2,978,244 total articles. There are 41 sites with free trial periods, and 31

completely free sites. 209 sites have free back issues, and 778 sites

have pay per view! "

The list of free full-text journals is at

http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl

HighWire Press is the cheapest option for private practitioners and free-

lance researchers. It offers access to FREE FULL-TEXT science

journals. Unfortunately, these comprise but a small percentage of all the

full-text science journals that are available.

3. PubMedCentral

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?CMD=search & DB=pmc

also gives access (in one single search panel) to free full-text journals in

the Life Sciences (including some veterinary journals with free full-text)

but the PMC free journal list may not be as extensive as the HighWire

list.

Janet Yelowchan wrote:

> Phil, do you know about this?

> http://www.medicalnewstoday.com/medicalnews.php?newsid=35884

The link reads:

> Infotrieve® Converts ArticleFinder® STM Search Engine To Free Access

> Model Category: Biology/Biochemistry News Article 09 Jan 2006 -

> 6am (UK)

> Infotrieve, Inc today announced that it had converted ArticleFinder,

> its online scientific, technical, and medical (STM) database with >26

> million citations and eight million abstracts from >54,000 journals, to

> a FREE ACCESS model.

> The move provides scientists and researchers, who work for

> corporations and are subject to different copyright regulations than

> their academic counterparts, with an end-to-end solution for

> conducting STM searches across literature from multiple providers. The

> solution seamlessly retrieves full-text scholarly journal articles

> that they need on a PAY-PER-VIEW basis.

Janet, many thanks for the alert.

Yes, INFOTRIEVE is a powerful engine to track down scientific articles.

However, although ABSTRACTS (if available) usually are free, the

FULL-TEXT is NOT FREE. Indeed, purchase of full-text articles via

InfoTrieve is VERY expensive and far beyond the budget of most

private practitioners and researchers outside of R & D organisations,

universities or corporations.

INFOTRIEVE is more likely to be used by commercial corporations who

may not have a subscrption to a fully integrated LIBRARY service (such

as ESCCO) for hardcopy and digital text. Subscription to the full range

of full-text science articles can cost several hundreds of thousands of

dollars annually! Also, not all science journals are in digital form yet.

Therefore, heir full-text must be scanned, as needed, and that costs a

lot.

Best regards,

HOME + WORK: 1 Esker Lawns, Lucan, Dublin, Ireland

Tel: (H): +353-(0) or (M): +353-(0)

<

" Man who says it can't be done should not interrupt man doing it " -

Chinese Proverb

January 17, 2006

Hi All, &

Micheál O' Mahony wrote:

> Phil & List I wasn't trying to sell DOAJ as the answer to all of your

> desires for access to articles. Its merely another nice online

> repository of open access journals, which I felt was of benefit in a

> thread on how the wider profession might access some full-text journal

> articles without breaking the bank. I would suggest DOAJ as a browse

> activity, rather than a search activity. So, if tired of not being able

> to access fulltext, someone could go there and identify amongst those

> open-access journals some that they that they like (I'd suggest

> Emerging Infectious Diseases) and browse those at their ease, in the

> knowledge that they'll not get the frustration of being denied

> full-text.

>

> For searching, I have had access to many of the expensive online search

> faciltiies for several years, such as CABI and ISI web of science, and

> would have in the past been a heavy user of Pubmed.

> However, in my opinion, they all pale in significance to the astounding

> abilities of the completely free Google scholar (still only beta)

> http://scholar.google.com/

Yes, Google Scholar is a very useful resource but it lags FAR behind

BIOMAIL as a research tool. I will comment in more depth on the

weakness of Google Scholar versus the strengths of BIOMAIL in a

separate note.

> (final tongue-in-cheek comment) As to the validation of the abilities

> of a scientific peer-review search engine using the number of hits to a

> term such as 'acupuncture' I think Phil and I would probably differ.

> Micheál

Yes, we probably differ, both on our assessment of the value of

acupuncture AND on the value of DOAJ!

If you prefer a different test, replace the word " acupuncture " with the

phrase " avian influenza " and repeat the test with the engines, as below.

For the search phrase " avian influenza " :

DOAJ Search Page at http://www.doaj.org/findarticles returned only 5

hits [full text]

In contrast, Scirus http://www.scirus.com/srsapp/advanced/index.jsp

returned 2124 hits from journal sources [most of them NOT free full-

text] and most of them from PubMed or PubmedCentral.

PubMedCentral alone

http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi?db=PMC returned 524

full-text hits

PubMed Medline http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/entrez/query.fcgi returned

1518 hits (mostly abstracts only).

http://highwire.stanford.edu/cgi/search/ returned 1028 articles [Highwire

Press hosted journals only, excluding Pubmed] or 2015 articles if

PubMed included.

I rest my case that DOAJ is a poor engine for those who wish to stay on

top of current literature in broad areas of scientific interest.

Best regards,

HOME + WORK: 1 Esker Lawns, Lucan, Dublin, Ireland

Tel: (H): +353-(0) or (M): +353-(0)

<

" Man who says it can't be done should not interrupt man doing it " -

Chinese Proverb

January 17, 2006