Stanford, California

HighWire Press, Stanford University's electronic journal development and hosting service, has recently opened a direct pipeline Internet connection with CERNET, the China Education and Research Network. Online content from HighWire-hosted journals, containing over 1.8 million articles to date (more than 750,000 full text articles are freely available without subscription), are now fully accessible through a locally-hosted broadband connection authorized and supported by the Ministry of Education of the People's Republic of China.

Because of this pathway to HighWire-hosted journals, readers affiliated with China's academic institutions are able to access high-impact journal content online without being charged for Internet traffic to foreign web sites. Chinese academic librarians can activate their online subscriptions and run COUNTER-compliant usage reports directly through each journal's subscriber help pages. The connection also allows Chinese researchers and students to use the free full-text searching and alerting features on the HighWire Portal: http://intl.highwire.org without incurring internal overseas access fees.

As a result of this direct channel access, HighWire-affiliated publishers have strengthened the link with their members, authors, and growing readership within China. By improving online access to high-impact journal content to current customers, and simplifying the route to the rapidly growing free content available through HighWire, the CERNET connection is another step on the road to breaking down barriers in disseminating knowledge on the World Wide Web.

--

About HighWire Press
HighWire Press, a division of the Stanford University Libraries, produces the online versions of high-impact, peer-reviewed journals and other scholarly content. Recipient of the 2003 ALPSP Award for "Service to Not-for-Profit Publishing", HighWire partners with influential societies, university presses and other scholarly publishers to create a collection of the finest, fully searchable research, clinical, humanities and social science literature online. Together, these partners produce nearly half of the 200 most-frequently-cited journals publishing in science. From a single host, users can find the largest repository of free full-text life science articles in the world: over 750,000 free articles, on the Stanford servers, plus links to thousands of others.

Born out of the serials crisis, HighWire Press was created as an alternative to commercial journal web aggregators. The HighWire portal was developed to provide a uniform interface for disparate journal sites, both as a user-friendly launch pad for scholarly research, and as a way to manage institutional subscriptions. Since 1995, with the launch of the Journal of Biological Chemistry (JBC), to the continuous online production of hundreds of prestigious journals, such as PNAS, Science Online, and the New England Journal of Medicine, HighWire has established an outstanding reputation for helping to disseminate primary scientific information on the Web. For further information, go to www.highwire.org or, for readers outside the U.S: http://intl.highwire.org

CERNET's National Center is located in Tsinghua University with regional, provincial, and campus backbones supported at universities throughout the country. Through international gateway bandwidth through channels connected by an Internet2 link to the United States and other countries, more than 1000 educational and research institutions, across over 200 cities, covering 10 million end users, have connected to CERNET to date. CERNET enhances the information infrastructure in China, shortens the gap between China and the west in the information industry, and plays a pioneer role in China's information initiative. www.edu.cn/HomePage/english/

-- 30 --

For more information:
Bonnie Zavon
Public Relations
HighWire Press - Stanford University
bzavon@stanford.edu
+1-650-723-0522