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Paper documents in archives, libraries, and museums often undergo biodeterioration by microorganisms. Fungi and less often bacteria have been described to advance paper staining, so called "foxing" and degradation of paper substrates. In this study, for the first time, the fungal and bacterial diversity in biodeteriorated paper documents of Hellenic General State Archives dating back to the 19th and 20th century has been assessed by culture-dependent and independent methods. The internally transcribed spacer (ITS) region and 16S rRNA gene were amplified by PCR from fungal and bacterial isolates and amplicons were sequenced. Sequence analysis and phylogeny revealed fungal phylotypes like Penicillium sp., Cladosporium sp., Penicillium citrinum, Alternaria infectoria, Alternaria alternata, Epicoccum nigrum, and Penicillium chrysogenum which are often implicated in paper deterioration. Bacterial phylotypes closely related to known biodeteriogenic bacteria such as Bacillus spp., Micrococcus spp., Kocuria sp. in accordance with previous studies were characterized. Among the fungal phylotypes described in this study are included well-known allergens such as Penicillium spp., Alternaria spp., and Cladosporium spp. that impose a serious health threat on staff members and scholars. Furthermore, fungal isolates such as Chalastospora gossypii and Trametes ochracea have been identified and implicated in biodeterioration of historical paper manuscripts in this study for the first time. Certain new or less known fungi and bacteria implicated in paper degradation were retrieved, indicating that particular ambient conditions, substrate chemistry, or even location might influence the composition of colonizing microbiota., (© 2018 The Authors. MicrobiologyOpen published by John Wiley & Sons Ltd.)

Many medical journals, publishing in national languages, meet serious financial problems and difficulties when they attempt to become indexed in the international indices. Obviously, this not only affects the scientific quality of non-indexed medical journals (NIMJs) but also affects the awareness of the scientific community of topics with apparently local but potentially broader scientific significance. This is a reality for over 100 Greek medical journals, none of which has a life longer than 30 years or more than 2000 subscribers. Among them, the 'Archives of Hellenic Medicine' (AHM) is published and sponsored by the Athens Medical Society (the oldest medical society in Greece founded in 1835). This peer-reviewed Journal is being published for 13 years, bimonthly, in Greek. Attempting to overcome the above mentioned problems and to be involved in the process of discovering the most effective way of scientific 'skywriting', 2 years ago, the AHM entered full-text in the Web and it was decided that up to 500% of its volume should be covered by English-language papers. As a result, the AHM are now included in the main Web lists of medical journals and their home page is linked in many academic pages having approximately 500 hits/month. Furthermore, 45 retrievals of AHM's English-language papers or English abstracts of Greek-language articles were reported by e-mail response from abroad. Considered apart from the paper-publishing, the expenses of the digital publishing of the AHM are about half of those of paper-publishing, as they were before the appearance of the Journal in the Web. Up to now, about 40% of the Journal's digital publishing cost is covered by advertisements included in its pages and by a modification of its paper-publishing policy. It is concluded that the international scientific community is not indifferent for information published in NIMJs. Medical national minorities working abroad express special interest for this type of information. The Web makes the NIMJs accessible to these potential readers, who would never have the chance to acquire them in their printed form.