Extracted from Figit Periodicals Digitisation Study. Marc Fresko - 15th June 1995 (http://138.38.32.45/elib/wk_papers/figit_periodicals.html). Please see this document for full links.
This relates to proposal 3/16 (backruns of numerous American and British physics journals.)
The Institute of Physics is currently engaged in publishing digitally, on CD-ROM, about 5 titles (out of a total 35) for about 4 years back.
The American Physical Society is half way through a project to scan 1988 - 1993 issues of Physical Review. A subsequent phase may scan all earlier issues (roughly 1893 to 1988). A project to convert back issues of Physical Review Letters (the Society's only other journal) into SGML format is under consideration, but will depend on the outcome of interest in Physical Review. These projects are undertaken on a commercial basis.
Simultaneously, two related projects are also under way with the co-operation of the Society. The Los Alamos laboratory has scanned all Physical Review titles for 1990 to 1995; and the Naval Research Laboratory has converted the text (without figures, equations etc.) of Physical Review E and Physical Review Letters for the same period into searchable form. The projects are related because the intent is to combine the searchable text with the page images to make a usable, searchable archive. At this point, the material is for use within the laboratories only.
Despite repeated requests, information was not forthcoming from the third publisher cited, namely the American Institute of Physics.
Elsevier's TULIP project has digitised 43 journals on materials science, all published by Elsevier Science. The digitised journals cover the period 1992 - 1995. Some may be taken to cover the field of Physics; but the titles are all published by Elsevier Science.
The SPIRES-HEP database at the Stanford Linear Accelerator Library has been collecting digital versions of pre-prints of journal papers in the field of high energy physics. As of late 1993, the collection had reached over 3,600 papers, and was growing at approximately 100 papers per week. This is thought to represent a significant proportion of publications in the field. While this is different to entire journals, it is likely that the content of some journals in this specialist field will be represented in their entirety in this database. A similar database is held at CERN in Geneva.
There are numerous other deposits of pre-prints at other sites on the Internet. An example of a site which lists several is http://www.physics.mcgill.ca/physics-services/physics_publ.html.
See also Adonis under the heading Chemistry above.