The Journal from 1812 to 1989 at NEJM.org.

If information is not in digital form, it may as well not exist for today’s researchers. That is what we have heard from those who oversee medical and scientific libraries. For several centuries, doing serious research meant spending hours in a major library, usually deep in the solitude of the stacks, exploring through heavy, bound volumes of the print literature. There was no alternative. And until this summer, for readers of the Journal there was no alternative for all that was published before 1993, since that is where the full-text online archive began. That has now changed. At NEJM.org, every issue of the Journal is available in electronic form all the way back to the first article, “Remarks on Angina Pectoris” by John Warren, published in January 1812.1 The more recent part of the archive from 1945 through 1989 is presented in an HTML format similar to that used for current issues, with full text, tables and figures, PDFs, and tables of contents. The older archive from 1812 through 1944 contains tables of contents plus PDFs of individual articles. The entire archive is fully searchable. This is possible because every page of the Journal was first scanned, using high-resolution technology to produce PDF files, which were then read, using optical character recognition, to produce the HTML. Tagging and indexing according to specialty were done by computer algorithm and Medline tags as far back as they were available. These processes are not perfect, and readers may find some errors that have been missed, especially in the older content. The entire archive consists of 8498 issues with 486,434 pages and 145,969 articles with 75,649 images. The success of this huge electronicconversion project required first finding a paper copy with all pages in satisfactory condition for every issue from 1812 through 1992. Some of these copies were difficult to locate, and some were missing from the Journal’s own paper archive. We are indebted to Harvard’s Countway Library for the loan of several rare, fragile originals from the 19th century. For any readers who find an error, please let us know at nejmredesign@ NEJM.org so that it can be corrected. The archive is being provided primarily through institutions, which can purchase either one or both parts. Institutions can then offer it without restriction to all who access the Journal through that institutional subscription. Individual subscribers receive 50 “tokens” per year for 24-hour access to an archive article. Access to content in the archive is also available on a per-article basis. Browsing of the titles and tables of content is easy and available to all. For all subscribers, unrestricted access to full text has been extended back to 1990. There are several relevant landmarks in the Journal’s historical archive. The Journal was founded in 1812 as the New England Journal of Medicine, Surgery and Collateral Branches of Science, and the first editor was John Collins Warren, a surgeon from the Massachusetts General Hospital. It was published quarterly until 1828, when it was merged with a weekly medical newspaper, the Boston Medical Intelligencer, to become the Boston Medical and Surgical Journal, which was published each Tuesday (although during 1827 it was published as the New England Medical Review and Journal). The Boston Medical and Surgical Journal was published weekly for 100 years, but after encountering financial difficulties, it was sold in 1928 to the Massachusetts Medical Society. This journal was serving