From June 2007 the complete archive of Annals of the Rheumatic Diseases – the Eular journal will be available online www.ard.bmj.com – that’s all issues from January 1939 to today. In keeping with the BMJ Group’s delayed free access policy all content older than 12 month’s is free to non-subscribers, including the newly digitised legacy content.

ARD was the first international rheumatology journal in English, so it attracted prominent authors, and their papers gave the first global mirror of rheumatology in Europe and North America as long ago as 1939. Interestingly, in the very first issue of the journal 6 of the 10 papers were about infections in …