Journal liberation: A community enterprise

"For many digitized journals, open access stops after 1922, because of uncertainty about copyright. However, most scholarly journals have public domain content after that date, so it’s possible to go further if you research journal copyrights. Thanks to records provided by the US Copyright Office and volunteers for The Online Books Page, we can determine that issues and articles of the NEJM prior to the 1950s did not have their copyrights renewed. With this knowledge, Hathi Trust has been able and willing to open access to many volumes from the 1930s and 1940s. We at The Online Books Page can then pull together these volumes and articles from various sources, and create a cover page that allows people to easily get to free versions of this journal and its predecessors all the way back to 1812. Most of the content of the New England Journal of Medicine has thus been liberated by the combined efforts of several different organizations (and other interested people)...."