The Pharmacologist, vol. 44, no. 1, March 2002:
HighWire Press Launches New Search Site for Researchers
HighWire Press has launched a newly designed Web site (http://highwire.stanford.edu) that offers seamless, full-text access to nearly 300 highly cited journals, plus simultaneous, searchable access to all of MEDLINE. Researchers now have faster, better, and more comprehensive access to online scientific, medical, and social sciences information. The site's search capabilities are freely available to all.
ASPET's five journals are published online through Stanford University's HighWire Press, the world's largest archive of free, peer-reviewed, full-text life sciences research with over 380,000 free full-text articles.
The new HighWire site allows researchers to be more productive and efficient in finding just the information they need. The site provides 12 powerful new search features, advanced browsing capabilities, linguistic processing, and a 4-color graphical TopicMap, which gives the researcher a sense of context while navigating HighWire's new peer-reviewed taxonomy in a tree-structured topical-database browser. Users of the site will have seamless access to both free and paid content and simplified management of content alerts.
"This past year, as scientists and publishers have debated the merits of making more of the literature free, researchers have told us what is important to the productivity and quality of their research: barrier-free access to more full-text content; easier, more comprehensive and more-precise cross-journal searching; and subject-specific, personalized email alerts," said John Sack, Director and Associate Publisher of HighWire Press. "The new HighWire site is our publishers' and HighWire Press's specific response to researchers' stated needs."
At the site, researchers and institutions will find a broader array of scientific content while making it easier for them to find the information they need:
More Content: HighWire Press now offers access to nearly 300 leading full-text journals including 80 of the 200 most frequently cited life science journals in the world, on the journals' own sites. In addition, the new site offers access to the entire content of MEDLINE, with one-click access to the full-text. The new design also makes it clear when an article is free (over 380,000 are), accessible via a personal or institutional subscription, or available through "pay per view".
Enhanced Search and Browse: New subject-based browsing features provide a way for researchers who are new to a field to browse articles, and for keyword-searchers to refine their searches by topic. The new HighWire site also offers an enhanced CiteTrack feature, which provides automatic updating of citation references as new articles are published. "Toll-free linking" gives researchers the full text of these cited references in any HighWire-based journal article.
Better Alerts: A single, comprehensive page lets a researcher create and manage both general "table of contents" alerts, as well as keyword/subject alerts in HighWire participating journals, plus all of PubMed.
More Timely Access: The HighWire site gives researchers access to online content often ahead of scheduled print issues and before its inclusion in other search services such as PubMed and MEDLINE.
Peer Reviewed Taxonomy: The new site offers researchers a rich taxonomy with more than 22,000 topic categories in a detailed hierarchy developed by professional librarians, with discipline-by-discipline peer review underway by leading researchers. Nearly 12 million articles have been categorized with almost a quarter of a billion topic entries.
Customization: As part of its response to researchers' need for more precision in their searching, HighWire now offers customizable "favorite" journal lists for tracking new content and more focused searching.
New features will be introduced in March and in May, based on the feedback HighWire receives from researchers. HighWire welcomes feedback from ASPET members.
The new HighWire site provides a single, powerful portal to the widest variety of medical and scientific journals available anywhere. This valuable research tool can be found at http://highwire.stanford.edu. Future articles in The Pharmacologist will cover features of the new portal that members find particularly helpful.