Date: Fri, 3 Mar 2006 18:23:39 +0530
From: ratnakar <ratnakar AT informindia.co.in>
Informatics launched the openj-gate portal as its contribution towards
open access movement. I am attaching to this mail a brief write up
about the function held on the 27th Feb at New Delhi. You may post
it in your regular distribution channels. The portal has already been
getting several thousands of hits and users are finding it to be more
meaningful than goggle scholar. I am sending another mail posted on
the lis-forum today by an user.
A. Ratnakar
Informatics (India) Ltd
New Delhi
World's largest Open Access e-journals portal launched
The placid and lackadaisical information infrastructure scenario of the
country saw a momentous action on Monday the 27th of Feb, when world's
first e-journals portal Open J-Gate (www.openj-gate.com) was launched by
Bangalore based Informatics (India) Ltd as a free service for everyone
across the globe. Informatics called the launch India's contribution to
the global research and the promotion of open access movement. Open Access
to journals is what Open Source is for software. As the name suggests,
access to open j-gate is free for any one to access across the world. It
has enhanced the information access of researchers not only in India but
all over the world.
The occasion for this historic launch was the 12th Annual Lecture on
Informatics at Indian National Academy of Sciences (INSA), where over 200
senior professors, scientists, librarians and researchers from most of the
top research and academic establishments of the country had gathered. Dr
Jean-Claude Guedon, a global expert of open access movement and founder of
Internet Society of Canada launched the Open J-Gate; he was sent by the
Open Society Institute (OSI), New York for this launch.
There are hundreds of journals, which are available from various publishers
and societies from across the globe free on the Internet. But all of them
are widely scattered and searching the articles and getting to them is a
very cumbersome job for researchers.
Open J-Gate is the first portal in the world to index over 3000+ open
access e-journals on one single searchable platform in the form of a
standard database bridging the access gap. The nearest comparable
initiative by Lund University, Sweden, covers less than 600 open access e-
journals.
UGC Vice Chairman Prof V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai shared his ideas on open
access issues that affect the most to the global scientific fraternity and
lauded the efforts of Informatics immensely for launching open J-Gate; a
portal direly needed by the resource starved Indian scientific community in
particular.
Dr. Guedon dwelled on the history of the open access movement and
emphasized the need of expanding the open access movement across the
globe. He congratulated the CMD of Informatics Mr. N V sathyanaryana for
his philanthropic venture and hailed Open J-Gate as a revolutionary step
for the global scientific community at large.
Open J-Gate has over a million articles published in 2,000+ peer
reviewed research journals in addition to articles from over 1,000 trade
and professional journals. The data base can be accessed at the URL
http://www.openj-gate.com
Received on Fri Mar 03 2006 - 15:29:12 GMT