Guest Post: Resources for Accessing Literature (Part 2 of 2)
[Note: This week we have a second guest post from Anne Powell. Anne worked as a librarian and library educator in Zimbabwe for 21 years before joining INASP in 2002. Thank you, Anne, for sharing your knowledge! –Barbara]
In last week’s blog post, I summarized some literature-access options that are for users in developing countries. Now I’ll note some options also available to others.
WorldWideScience.org provides one-stop searching of national and international scientific databases and portals. Some of the resources that are cross-searched through it are DOAJ (see below) and all the journals in INASP's JOL program (African Journals Online, Bangladesh Journals Online, Nepal Journals Online, Philippine Journals Online, and Vietnam Journals Online).
DOAJ (Directory of Open Access Journals) offers links to free, full-text, quality-controlled scientific and scholarly journals. The journals are in a wide range of subjects and languages.
PubMed Central, from the US National Institutes of Health (NIH), is a free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature.
Here are some multi-lingual resources:
- Bioline International publishes in the fields of health, biodiversity, the environment, conservation, and international development. Many of the journals are open-access.
- SciELO—Scientific Electronic Library Online has research articles from Latin America in Spanish, Portuguese, and English.
- VHL—Virtual Health Library has links to many health-information sources in English, Spanish, and Portuguese.
INASP maintains a list of multi-disciplinary and subject-related resources.
We hope the blog posts this week and last week will help you access the literature. Happy searching!