By Lee Pharis, Manager - Information Resources, Exponent
On August 29, the Solo Librarians met at St. Jude Medical in Sunnyvale for a meeting hosted by Eric Kristofferson with guest speaker Bonnie Zavon from HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries. http://highwire.stanford.edu/
Started in 1995, HighWire Press currently hosts the primary, definitive version of 1,065 sites from more than 130 scholarly publishers, typically independent societies, associations, university presses and other publishing houses which produce high-impact journals. The topical focus has generally been in the biosciences areas, but the subject matter is expanding.
Full-text articles, high-resolution images, data supplements, and back issue content are all available through HighWire. As soon as an article from one of the journals collections is published, it is available on HighWire (before or sometimes instead of the print copy).
HighWire-hosted publishers have collectively made almost 2 million scholarly articles free, the largest repository of free, peer-reviewed full-text content on the web. (Publishers determine which articles are free, and which require payment, not HighWire.)
About 300 of the journals on HighWire offer some form of free access to full text, often after only a year, thanks to the business policies of the various publishers.
Using the HighWire search engine portal to publisher web sites is free; you can register for free with HighWire, and customize your free account. It is easy to access and to navigate.
The HighWire Portal is a feature-rich search gateway, from broad searching across a large collection of journal databases to customized searching using a list of personal favorite journals, plus the ability to easily set up e-Table of Contents, citation, author or keyword alerts. Advanced search features allow a searcher either to limit keywords to particular fields or dates, and select from a list of subject categories, or to expand a search using tools which incorporate taxonomy subject categories and subcategories. Near each resulting record is a link to a "Find more like this" tool that HighWire calls Matchmaker. Matchmaker uses a weighting system to match topic patterns in a selected article with similar patterns in other HighWire-hosted articles. A user can adjust the settings and conduct a new search using the new weighting.
Results are provided with bibliographic information and keywords-in-context so that at a glance it can be determined if results are relevant. In the list of search results the searcher can quickly scan to see if a full-text article is free, or free to the user by subscription, or if payment is required, and if so, how much for pay-for-view. A link to either the free PDF copy or to point-of-purchase allows a reader to obtain the article immediately. If the searcher needs to develop a bibliography, the Citation Manager tool enables selected citations to be easily downloaded into one of five different bibliographic software tools, e.g. EndNote or RefWorks.
On HighWire, 71 of the 200 most frequently cited journals are available. This helps make it possible to identify articles that have cited the article in which you’re interested, if those articles are also included in HighWire. And by working with Google Scholar to bring more depth to both systems, HighWire has made it possible for the user to also expand their search to other articles on Google Scholar instantly at the article level. To top it off, HighWire provides a graphically useful tool called Citation Map that helps the user understand the relationships between the articles – those citing, those cited, and those most cited.
Click-through Reference Links can be found in the "References" section of articles. Note that if a citation listed in the References section at the end of an article on a HighWire-hosted journal is for a journal title also hosted on HighWire, you can read the full text of the article even if the linked reference is to a journal that is neither subscribed to nor designated as free. The first view seen when the link is clicked is the abstract, but the HighWire servers will recognize the searcher as coming from a reference within the HighWire domain, and will allow access to the full-text article. This "toll-free linking" does not apply to the full issue of subscription-only journals, but does allow the reader to access the full text of the referenced article without charge.
HighWire’s intent is to help not-for-profit publishers thrive in the Internet environment, not to be in the publishing business itself. Because HighWire acts as a technical service provider to independent scholarly publishers, it is also part of the librarian community, and has made the portal useful to librarians to manage subscription collections. HighWire is neither a journal aggregator nor a subscription agent, but has coordinated the tools needed for librarians to take charge of their accounts. The benefit to using HighWire as an interface is that it simplifies subscription and IP address management by connecting your subscriptions all under a single library HighWire portal account so that statistics can be gathered on most subscribed journals (hosted by HighWire) regardless of the publisher.
There is too much detail on this service to summarize here, so please peruse the HighWire web site (and the "For Institutions" section of the portal) or contact Bonnie.
Questions can be directed to Bonnie at [email protected].
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