Through e-consortium, the inflibnet (Information and Library Network) Centre, Ahmedabad, an Inter-University Centre of the University Grants Commission (UGC) has enabled over 150 universities across the country to access around 8,000 full text scholarly journals of which 4,000 are subscribed journals from leading international publishers.
The e-resources cover almost all subject disciplines including arts, humanities, social sciences, physical sciences, chemical sciences, life sciences, computer sciences, mathematics and statistics.
This provision obviates the need for the university libraries to spend heavily on individual subscription of prestigious e-journals, and thereby facilitate and expand the scope for quality research.
Possibility has been created for hassle-free online access of 35 journals published by American Chemical Society, 18 by American Institute of Physics, eight by American Physical Society, 33 Annual Reviews, 489 journals published by Wiley-Blackwell, 220 by Cambridge University Press, 46 by Institute of Physics, 125 by ISID (The Institute for Studies in Industrial Development), 168 by J-STOR, 200 by Oxford University Press, 400 by Project Muse, 25 by Royal Society of Chemistry, 1,750 by Springer Link, and 1,365 journals published by Taylor & Francis.
The JCCC (J-Gate Custom Content for Consortium), a 50-member grouping of Indian Institutes of Technology, National Institutes of Technology, and other top-notch institutions in India, provides current as well as archival access to more than 4,500 core and peer-reviewed journals and nine bibliographic databases from 23 publishers and aggregators in different disciplines.
The programme was implemented in a phased manner. In the first phase in 2004, access to e-resources was provided to 50 top-notch universities and institutions. In the second phase in the following year, 50 more universities were added. So far, 120 universities out of 171 that come under the purview of UGC have been provided differential access to the subscribed e-resources, S. Srinivasaragavan, Chief Librarian and Head, Department of Library and Information Science, Bharathidasan University, told The Hindu Education Plus.
Also, researchers in the 150 and above Indian universities can make the most of the over 1,000 open access e-journals and open access directories. The open access e-journals published in developing countries are available in several subjects including bioscience, medicine, chemical sciences, mathematical sciences, materials science, astrophysics, astronomy, earth system and genetics.
The open access e-journals comprise those published by Bioline International ( >http://bioline.org.br/ ), BioMed Central (http:// >www.biomedcentral.com/ ), HighWire Press (http:// >highwire.standford.edu/ ), Indian Academy of Sciences (http:// >www.ias.ac.in/ ), Indian Journals (http:// >indianjournals.com/ ), Journal of Digital Information (http:// >jodi.tamu.edu/ ), Journal of Postgraduate Medicine (http:// >www.jpgmonline.com/ ), MedIND (http:// >medint.nic.in/ ), MedKnow (http://medknow.com/), Molecular Diversity Preservation Internatioal (http:// >www.mdpi.org/ ), Public Library of Science (http:// >www.plos.org/ ), PubMed Central (http:// >www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/ ), and Trials (http:// >www.trialsjournal.com/ ).
As for open access directories, 1,827 journals on a variety of subjects including Agriculture and Food Sciences, Arts and Architecture, Business and Economics, History and Archaeology, Languages and Literatures, Mathematics and Statistics, Philosophy and Religion, and Technology and Engineering, are searchable at article level at the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Till date, 3,49,0422 articles have been included in the DOAJ Service, said Dr. Srinivasaragavan.
Also, sixty free medical journals are available. The J-Gate provides seamless access to millions of journal articles available online, he said, adding that Open J=Gate is also a database of journal literature, indexed from 3,000-plus open access journals with links to full text at publisher sites.
