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 affordable indexing and abstracting service to libraries for journal literature; and (c) To assist 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 free-for-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 and the Web. Open access implies that an Open Access Journal is hosted on the web for unrestricted access by its users, either immediately or within a year of its publication. Web is a wild and unruly jungle - a sure place for the content to be lost. Hence, discovery systems are more important for the content on the web than the content stored in a library. Open access movement did focus on the discovery aspect leading to development of metadata harvesting standards (OAI/PMH) and services. But, these were largely limited to and followed by the institutional repositories (IRs). Most journal publishers have not heard of OAI/PMH. Hence, metadata harvesting from journals remains a laborious process, and continues to be so even now unless either the publishers make available the metadata or follow OAI/PMH standard to support automatic metadata harvesting.
OJ’s Coverage
The journal coverage policy of J-Gate provides for indexing articles from both scholarly (peer-reviewed) and popular (professional & industry) journals. Informatics believes that the journals in the latter category are also important for the academic and scholarly community, and particularly the students in higher education.
Currently Open J-Gate indexes articles from more than 8,400 journals available for free access. Of these, over 5,600 journals are in the scholarly domain. The following two tables present statistical count of journals in J-Gate and Open J-Gate, and their subject-wise distribution.
In terms of subject-wise spread, biomedical sciences (all Medical and related life sciences) account for the highest percentage of journals covered. Table 2 reflects subject-wise coverage of journals in Open J-Gate. It should be noted that J-Gate classification system does place a journal in more than one subject category depending on the multi-disciplinary nature of the journal.
Features & Functionalities
Open J-Gate is designed to be simple and easy to use. All features and functionalities in J-Gate are provided in Open J-Gate also. The service has two Dr A Ratnakar modules for users to navigate. Users can: (a) browse the table of contents of the latest issues (like in Current Contents); and (b) Search across all journals or within a selected list of journals by broad subject categories.
Future
We estimate the total coverage of free journals in J-Gate at around 30 per cent, with number of freely available articles at around 20 per cent. At current growth trends, we expect the open access content to cross 50 per cent in the next 10 years. With the gradually increasing quantitative pressure, open access content will N V Sathyanarayana acquire its acceptance standard in qualitative terms too. The journals in the open access domain now provide critical mass of content for exploring an independent citation index.
Open J-Gate is expected to undergo a major enhancement in its content and user interface in the coming months as J-Gate itself will be moving to a new platform in 2011, supporting several new innovative features and functionalities. For some strange reason usage of Open J-Gate is much wider outside India than within.
A Ratnakar and N V Sathyanarayana
Informatics India Ltd
Bangalore 560 004, India
11 March 2011
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