Critical care testing in the new millennium: the integration of point-of-care testing.

Electronic journals offer inescapable advantages for researchers and practitioners. We access information with a speed that was unimaginable only a few years ago, and with the click of a mouse, we link to cited articles, read related Letters to the Editor, and find papers that have cited the articles we are reading. All this and more, but a nagging doubt has persisted, especially among librarians, about the “permanence” (or “archiving”) not only of the electronic article, but also of the rich links and other enhancements related to the articles. The Stanford University Libraries’ HighWire Press, where Clinical Chemistry Online resides, has taken a keen interest in this problem. Information specialists there have devised a comprehensive plan for preserving and assuring access to the more than 170 scholarly journals they host on the web. The account that follows explains for interested readers some of the steps that will ensure that today’s Clinical Chemistry Online will be available (without charge) far into the future. One may now wonder whether the paper copies of the Journal will be readable as long. As explained by Michael A. Keller, Stanford University Librarian and publisher of HighWire Press, “Preserving and protecting information is one of the core functions of libraries. As librarians running HighWire as a service to academia and its publishers, we are just as concerned with the preservation of the online journals as we are with preserving rare books and manuscripts”. Online journals involve volatile access, a continuously growing body of articles and links, and the “traditional” problems of changing technologies (e.g., servers, programs, storage media, and readers’ devices). If they cancel a subscription, librarians want to be sure they can still get access to data they “paid” for previously. If an online publication changes its policies or ceases to be accessible, librarians want to be sure that published material does not disappear along with the publication’s servers. John Sack, Associate Publisher and Director of HighWire Press, has explained that, “[The HighWire] program includes three features: redundant and distributed backups; forward format-migration; and distributed archiving. Much of the richness of our online journal treatment is the intelligent and automated linking. What one could call passive archiving—stuffing a body of information in a can or putting it on tape, CD, microfilm, or even paper—is valuable in a limited way, but doesn’t deal with the dynamism of the online environment. If you think of the problem in terms only of ‘snapshots’ or static storage in some kind of vault, you’re missing much of the functionality that most journals and scientists sought in going from print to online”. The HighWire archival program addresses immediate safety concerns (e.g., hardware failures and destructive hacking) through redundancy and geographic dispersion with use of the same system that protects data from the university’s three hospitals, as well as its academic records. In the longer term, Keller says, “The Stanford Libraries are looking at HighWire’s archiving program from the point of view of the 22nd Century at least. Once a publisher instructs HighWire to enable access to a given article or piece, the community should be confident it will be at least as freely available in a decade or a generation as it is today. Scholars and libraries should demand no less from any online source”. (Articles in Clinical Chemistry Online are freely available 1–2 years after publication.) Migration (of formats, standards, and media) is a fundamental issue addressed in the HighWire program. Continuing processes at HighWire include preserving publisher-supplied data and migrating data from printer formats to industry-standard SGML and HTML, along with current standard file formats such as PDF and GIF. (In addition, HighWire regularly upgrades versions of HTML over time.) HighWire also physically migrates publisher-supplied content from relatively unstable DAT tapes to robust disk arrays. HighWire also provides long-term storage of the digital source data from which subsequent delivery formats are derived; this will allow multiple options should later technology allow for superior utility and function. Interested readers can find more information and details at www. highwire.stanford.edu.