Electronic archive of 16 journals dating back 200 years is launched

Anyone wanting to read Alan Hodgkin and Andrew Huxley's 1952 paper proposing the ionic theory of nerve impulses no longer has to travel to a specialist scientific library. The paper, “Measurement of current-voltage relations in the membrane of the giant axon of Loligo ” (Journal of Physiology 1952;116:424-48), which put its authors on the way to a Nobel prize, is one of thousands now freely available online as part of an historic archive of 16 biomedical journals dating back nearly 200 years. The backfiles archive—which will include the BMJ —was launched last week under an …