Saturday, April 12, 2008

Open Science Directory: New Open Access Initiative for Developing Countries


EBSCO has recently joined forces with Hasselt University Library, Belgium, and the International Oceanographic Data and Information Exchange programme of the Intergovernmental Oceanographic Commission of UNESCO to develop a global Open Science Directory which is available via the Internet at no charge. The Open Science Directory provides developing regions with a comprehensive search tool for all open access and special programme journal titles. The Open Science Directory offers immediate access to approximately 13,000 scientific journal titles, with an objective of 20,000 titles midway through development.
Access to scientific literature is very important for the scientific work in developing countries. As a result of different projects a large collection of e-journals is now available for researchers in developing countries. The number of Open Access Journals is growing steadily as we can see in the Directory of Open Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org/). Major UNO organizations like WHO, FAO and UNEP have their specific programs for the scientific institutions in low-income countries. Finally a lot of universities, institutes and other organizations are supporting access programs. The most important are INASP, eIFL and eJDS.
The Open Science Directory is creating a unique access point to all the journals contained in the different programs.
Searching Options:
* From the home page, click on Open Science Directory
* The Portal is an A-to-Z journals list ( as in UJ A-to-Z)
* You can either search directly for specific journals
OR
* Select - Journal Collections - to view all Providers of the Journals, with links to the title lists
* Select - Subjects - to view the journals per specific subject area
* Select - Search - to view the Advanced search screen
* Select - Custom Google Search - to search either Scholar Google (academic articles) or Google Custom Search (Search in: DOAJ - OpenDOAR - HINARI - OARE - AGORA - INASP - eJDS - Ingenta Connect)
* Select - Links - to have access to journals portals, useful websites to different organisations
* Select - About the Site - to view more information about this site
Once you access the journal of interest, there is an option to search within this journal for articles.
I hope you will find this Open Science Directory very useful.
I will create a direct link on this BLOG under Open Access Journals

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

Pavlinka,

Thank you for this valuable service to us. It is very much appreciated. It really helps with our searches for the latest relevant literature.