Digital preservation service Portico recently alerted to a groundbreaking journal that was no longer available to the academic community. The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials (OJCCT) launched in 1992 as part of a collaboration between OCLC and the American Association for the Advancement of Science (AAAS), and was one of the earliest electronic scientific journals. The title was sold to Chapman and Hall in 1994 (later becoming part of CRC Press and then Taylor & Francis). Through these transitions, the title ceased publication and went offline. While some of the articles OJCCT published are indexed in Medline and Worldcat, many of them are no longer available, including some early and important papers on randomised clinical trials.
Portico was contacted by a librarian at Johns Hopkins University, Ms. Mariyam Thohira, who worked with Dr. Kay Dickersin, professor and a former associate editor at the OJCCT, to see if there was way to locate and preserve the journal. Portico worked with Taylor & Francis, who granted the rights to preserve the journal and trigger it as open access. While they were unable to provide content for the journal, Johns Hopkins University was able to supply a number of missing articles.
Portico has now triggered this content, and it is openly available.
While majority of the articles OJCCT published have been preserved and triggered, Portico has been unable to locate a number of articles. The organisation is calling on the community to help locate and preserve this missing content, so that it can be made openly accessible. Additional information and a list of content is available online at https://www.portico.org/online-journal-current-clinical-trials-missing-content/.
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