Science Classic, a New Digitized Archive, Allows Users to Look Back in Time

The journal Science announced today the official launch of Science Classic—the newly digitized full-text archive of the journal that features cover-to-cover access of every issue from its first issue in 1880 through 1996. This unique new comprehensive interface makes it easier to search the journal’s entire archived collection.

The Science Classic back file includes the very first issue of Science published under founder Thomas A. Edison and complements Science Online, which covers issues from 1997 until today. All articles from the back file will carry the Science Classic logo for easy identification.

“Over 150,000 articles in high resolution PDF format will be accessible on the interested scientist's desktop,” explained Beth Rosner, the publisher of the journal Science. Every page of the back issue file has been scanned as a high-resolution PDF which offers sharp, print-quality text as well as optimized files for fast Web transmission.

The content of the comprehensive archives includes groundbreaking research of the human genome and the genes for breast and colon cancer as well as other original research, commentary and policy articles, news stories, letters, book reviews, association affairs and more.

“AAAS believes it must provide members and customers with instantaneous access to everything ever published in the journal Science from one central location,” said Deborah Rivera-Wienhold, the director of business operations at AAAS. “This complete electronic collection will improve the efficiency of our researchers—one look, one feel, and one functionality in one common interface with the current version of Science Online, 1997 to the present.”

Science Classic is now integrated with the current content of Science Online and provides easy access to scientific articles fully text indexed and searchable. The complete collection of Science papers from Volume 1, Issue 1, July 1880 through December 1996 is now accessible from the Science homepage (see Previous Issues) or directly at www.sciencemag.org/archive/.

“Science Online and Science Classic together provide one-stop shopping for all of Science,” says Stewart Wills, the online editor of Science. “That means that researchers can search the entire collection through one convenient, familiar search interface, and really dig into how a scientific concept has developed over time. And for all users, it's a window into some of the key articles and ideas that have shaped the last century and a half of scientific inquiry.”

The interface offers a new full range of electronic research tools to streamline searching with current Science content: chronological searching, reverse chronological searching, date-limited searching, searching located under previous issues, each year separated by issue searching, and full-text PDFs and separate linkable referencing.

Each article’s bibliographic citation, abstract and references are compiled into an interactive HTML file, a feature which allows dynamic linking to other Science articles, toll-free access to thousands of articles from non-profit journals hosted on the HighWire platform, and finally to the primary source from for-profit journals via CrossRef. AAAS plans on placing all of the back file metadata into CrossRef, the citation linking backbone for all scholarly information in electronic form; the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), a unique reference number assigned to every original article and research paper, adds another way to search the content.

“Science has been a pioneer in providing online full-text access to scientific news and research since late 1996,” Wills said. “Now, with the addition of Science Classic, users can get the rest of the pie—instant, seamless access to the whole of the Science collection, from the first issue in July 1880 through the latest cutting-edge papers of today.”

AAAS members have full-text access to Science Classic as a member benefit, at no charge. Institutional access requires a separate site license. However, AAAS does provide free access to summaries and abstracts. For further information, please call 202-326-6730 or e-mail scienceclassic@aaas.org.

Natasha Pinol

14 September 2006