Open Access to Scholarly Literature in India - Centre for Internet and ...

Box 6, Open J-Gate: India’s Contribution to Open Access Movement
Informatics conceived J-Gate in the year 2000 to serve three purposes: (a) Develop
a global e-Journal portal for indexing and linking to full-text of every article published in
every available online English language journal; (b) To provide a comprehensive and
fordable indexing and abstracting service to libraries for journal literature; and (c) To
sist Indian libraries in their resource-sharing and consortia initiates for journal literature.
J-Gate evolved in its market acceptance by its ability to customize the service as a search
engine and gateway service for journals subscribed by a library or a group of libraries. J-
Gate today has emerged as the world’s largest bibliographic services for e-Journals in
English language, indexing articles from 23,877 e-Journals, of which 16,298 are in the
scholarly domain. As the product was started in 2000, articles since 2000 are indexed for
all journals. However for about hundred major publishers who deliver the metadata to
Informatics, like Springer, IOP, Annual Reviews, OUP, and Taylor & Francis, the coverage
is extended to several back years going back to Volume 1 in many cases. JSTOR has
recently joined J-Gate to make available its metadata content and facilitate access through
J-Gate. 89
Open J-Gate : Comprehensive Discovery System for open access Journals
Open access movement was in its formative stage when Informatics initiated the development
of J-Gate in 2000. The ripples of the movement was beginning to impact by
then with the open access publishing initiatives of PLoS, SPARC, Biomed Central, etc.
Recognizing the undercurrents of change, Informatics made a provision in its e-Journal
Directory, which is a back-end component of its J-Gate, to indicate if a journal was
available for free access. By 2005, it was found that the number of open access journals
in J-Gate had grown to a respectable level of over 10 per cent.
J-Gate being a subscription based service, Informatics realized that to access the open
access content indexed in J-Gate, users will have to subscribe to J-Gate. As a mark of its
commitment to open access movement, Informatics decided to spin-off a separate freefor-all
service for open access only journals to facilitate seamless and unrestricted discovery
of and access to open access content. Prof. Jean-Claude Guedon, a prominent
global advocate open access movement, visited India to launch Open J-Gate in February
2006 as a service by Informatics dedicated to promote the global open access movement.
Open Access and the Journal Metadata
Open access movement, in some respect, is a consequence of the evolution of Internet
89 http://www.openj-gate.com.
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