Nature Publishing Group (NPG) has signed a major agreement with the French national licensing programme ISTEX, to make key scientific resources available to the French research community.
More than 1.9m students, researchers and scientists at over 200 French universities and institutions will have access to the full archives of Nature from 1869 to 2012 on nature.com. The agreement will also include the archives of seven other specialised titles in immunology, biology, chemistry and neurosciences, around 400,000 articles in total.
Launched in 2012, ISTEX aims to provide online access to digital publications in all disciplines throughout the French research community on one central platform and currently holds more than 6 million articles from 2,500 journal titles.
The programme is a joint effort between the Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS) and the French National Agency for Research (ANR), who have signed a funding agreement with the Ministry of Higher Education and Research. The €60m budget to be spent over three years includes €55m for the acquisition of scientific archives and €5m for the creation of the platform that will host the acquired data.
“ISTEX provides both researchers and students with an invaluable collection of academic resources,” said Dean Sanderson, Commercial Director, Nature Publishing Group. “We are delighted that Nature Publishing Group is helping serve ISTEX’s information provision for institutions in France, and proud to be part of these ambitious digital plans.”
“The priority of ISTEX is not only about archive acquisitions, but also a research and development project. The platform provides the full texts of a very large corpus, which in turn, offers many new opportunities for research discoveries across the country,” says the ABES Director, Jérôme Kalfon.
