Unis free to rummage through century of physics research

Universities are to get free access to the Institute of Physics' digital journal-archives, a collection of scientific research spanning more than 100 years of publishing. The archive holds more than 110,000 articles and 1.5m pages of physics research including papers by Sir John Fleming, Sir Ernest Rutherford, Niels Bohr, Lord Rayleigh and Sir Edward Appleton.

The access is made possible through a special agreement between the Institute of Physics (IoP) and the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC). It will make some of the most important discoveries in physics available for free for the first time, including the Nobel Prize-winning work of Rutherford, in which he laid out the basis of the physics of radioactivity.

The IoP says that the archive, which it digitized in 2002, is worth around £30,000 to university libraries. "The Institute of Physics aims to ensure that every UK scientist who needs to read any paper it has published can do so," said Jerry Cowhig, managing director of the IoP Publishing. "This agreement means that more libraries than ever before will be able to afford access to the UK’s biggest archive of physics research."

Academic institutions should visit the JISC website here and download a licence agreement. ®

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