Abstract
BIDS has now been running for six years. It was launched in February 1991 and was the first service of its kind anywhere, providing large scale networked access to ISI's bibliographic databases for the benefit of the whole UK higher education community (students, research workers, lecturers). The service is heavily used and very popular. The ISI databases alone are currently servicing nearly 10,000 sessions a day at peak times. Current peak totals for all databases are nearly 12,000 sessions a day.
Virtually every major higher education institution in the UK now subscribes to one or more BIDS services and it is reckoned that about 1% of all UK academics and researchers access BIDS each day. Non-UK sites also subscribe to some databases with users, for example, in Norway and Sweden.
In the Autumn of 1996 an entirely new BIDS service was launched. This service, which complements and builds on the bibliographic data services, is known as JournalsOnline. It provides end-users with network access to the full text of articles that have been published in recognised scholarly journals. Many of these journals are available free at the point of use to any academic anywhere in the UK Higher Education sector through a nationally negotiated site licence arrangement.