Portal .periodicos. CAPES: the Brazilian national electronic library consortium for science and technology

The Portal  .periodicos.  CAPES   is the Brazilian national electronic library consortium for science and technology.  The program is maintained by CAPES, a public foundation attached to the Ministry of Education with the mission to promote the development of graduate and research programs in Brazil.
More than  1,321,000 faculty members, researchers, graduate and undergraduate students and technical personnel of 157 institutions have free access to the full-text of more than 9,000 leading journals and the premier multidisciplinary and subject databases covering all areas of academic activity.
With an annual budget of US$ 29,120,333.00 for 2005, the Portal is a successful government service to the academic community in Brazil.  Cost per access reached an all-time low of  US$ 0.91 in 2004.  The cost per full-text article dropped from US$ 7.37 in 2001 to US$ 2.81 in 200 5. The cost per use of abstract databases dropped from US$ 10.57 in 2001 to US$ 3.23 in 2005.
Special attention is given to Brazilian scholarly publications:  the Banco de Teses da CAPES with 252,000  references to theses and dissertations and more than 430 journals published by Brazilian universities, research institutions, government agencies and professional associations.
The collection also includes a selection of free-access scientific information sources available on the internet: full-text patent databases, abstract databases, e-print archives, full-text scientific journals and books, statistics databases and other resources.
The Portal offers an excellent collection of highly used journals in the Biological and Health Sciences.