International Seminar on Open Access for Developing Countries - Salvador, Bahia - Brazil

    BIREME/PAHO/WHO
    Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information
    Pan American Health Organization / World Health Organization

    Salvador, Bahia - Brasil - September 21-22, 2005

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    Open Access journals in India

    Participants:
    • speaker
      Senior Technical Director of the Indian MEDLARS Centre, National Informatics Centre  - India
    Documents:

    This presentation reviews the Open Access journals in India focusing mainly in the area of Medical and Allied Sciences. India has over 300 biomedical journals that include hospital newsletters and bulletins out of which a fraction of these are covered in international resources like Medline or are available full-text over the Net.   A few years ago NLM’s Medline included full-text of three Indian journals online - Indian Pediatrics, Neurology India & Indian Journal of Medical Research with Indian Pediatrics being one of the 1st Indian biomedical journals to be made freely accessible over Net.  Following the example of Indian Pediatrics, other journals also made their way to the Net and were accessible to their users (free or paid subscription).  In 1998 the ICMR-NIC Centre for Biomedical Information (Indian Medlars Centre) took up the challenge of creating a bibliographic database of peer reviewed Indian biomedical journals, IndMED (over 75 journals) and in the year 2003 it launched the full-text free access version of this database and named it medIND (35 journals till date). The aim was to provide a one-point resource to peer reviewed Indian biomedical literature.  Another commercial venture offering an e-portal to journals is J-Gate of Informatics India, serving as an e-gateway to global e-journal literature providing seamless access to millions of journal articles available online by linking to full text at publisher sites.  Till the Budapest and Bethesda Open Access Initiatives, there were several “free access” ventures under way and once this movement caught up in India, commercial ventures like MedKnow Publications and several other individual journals started coming under the umbrella of “open access”.     MedKnow Publications is a leading commercial e-publisher hosting individual journal’s websites for over 20 prominent Indian biomedical journals. Open access initiatives in the area of S & T include the Indian National Science Academy’s ejournals@insa, which makes available INSA publications on the web and JCCC@INDEST, a customized solution for accessing & sharing journal literature subscribed by all the Indian Institutes of Technology, Indian Institute of Science and Indian Institutes of Management. Others include the JCCC@HELINET, for Health Sciences Library & Information Network (HELINET),  Bangalore, UGC Infonet E-Journals Consortium providing  links to prominent international e-journals’ publishers and  JCCC@CSIR a consortia for resources of Council for Scientific & Industrial Research.   There are also professional institutes that are offering access to E-journals from websites (restricted access or open access).  Several international Open Access providers like PubMED, DOAJ, BIOLINE, and PLoS are also including Indian biomedical journals/literature.  In the year 2004, the movement of “Open Archives” also caught the interest of the S & T community of the country and several Archives were launched following workshops conducted by the pioneers of Open Access and Open Archives movement in India (Dr. Arunachalam and late Dr. Rajashekar).  Till date 11 Archives have been launched and prominent amongst these are the Eprints@IISc (the first and foremost), LDL Librarian’s Digital Library, DSpace@NCL and NIC’s OpenMED.  OpenMED@NIC is an International Archive in the area of Medical and Allied Sciences developed primarily with the aim of promoting self-archiving amongst Indian professionals. This Archive (from 1952-2005) uses the Medical Subject Headings for indexing and has over 200 registered users and more than 500 publications.