As a research university with an excellent life science research faculty and an extraordinary medical school and hospitals, Stanford is vitally interested in the communication of research results. Also, as a research institution, Stanford is strongly interested in the economics of provision of scholarly information to researchers, especially STM research information. Concerned that scientific societies separately would lack the resources and expertise to lead a major technical infrastructure shift in publications, Stanford University, in founding HighWire, accepted the role of partner, agent of change, and advisor. Begun as a close collaboration of scientists, librarians and publishers, it has not strayed from that model in its six years of rapid growth. This ranges from individual subscriptions to institutional access, and can even scale up to consortial or national access policies.
Much content is, of course, available to all users on the Web without subscription.
With profound and growing ties to the societies and publishers it serves, and equally profound links to scholars and the research library community, HighWire emphasizes another species of communication as well.