Scientific publisher 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 1.9 million 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 €60 million budget to be spent over three years includes €55 million for the acquisition of scientific archives and €5 million for the creation of the platform that will host the acquired data.
