Supported by the Library’s Journal Hosting Service, Res Medica, the Journal of the Royal Medical Society, is publishing its archives online.

Res Medica was founded in 1957 with the purpose to promote academic research amongst medical students at the University of Edinburgh. The journal is being resurrected by some very keen Society members who will publish the first new issue of the journal on Monday 23rd September.

In the run up to publication of the new issue, a volume of the archives will be published each day. All archives from 1957-2005 will be made available over the next few months.

Volume 1 is available via the journal website: http://journals.ed.ac.uk/resmedica

(click on the Archives link at the top of the page).

The Library’s Digital Imaging Unit has scanned all back issues of the journal and Library Learning Services – with fantastic help and support from the Scholarly Communications team-  have been formatting and OCRing scans to make the journal issues and articles searchable.

You don’t have to be a medic to find something interesting, or indeed, controversial in the archives.

The back issues offer a fascinating insight not only to medicine of the time, but also to the history of the Society and the University.  It’s been an interesting project – we’ve been mildly outraged (on several occasions) and in particular, at the comments accompanying the report on the decision to first admit women to public business in 1964!!  We’ve also had a bit of a chortle at the amount of Guinness adverts.

(Disclaimer: the Library does not endorse drinking Guinness for seven days running!)

If you would like to find out more about using the journal hosting service  to publish a new OA peer -reviewed journal or migrate a journal from print to online, please get in touch angela.laurins@ed.ac.uk