3.0 Introduction

Academic and research publishing in recent times have experienced emergence of electronic platforms for effective research collaborations and research disseminations. Research communication and more particularly academic publishing processes require effective integration of information and communication technologies (ICT) for harnessing production of qualitative knowledge and dissemination to audiences globally. Peer-reviewed scholarly journals around the world are gradually migrating to electronic platforms, to make their contents globally visible, accessible, searchable and citable. Many peer-reviewed journals are now migrating from print edition to open access edition to make their knowledge resources freely accessible by the global researchers’ communities. On the other hand, exponential growth of scientific literature also has led to rapid disappearance of produced literature before it actually gets noticed by the scientific communities. Here, journal aggregators and online full-text databases help in long term digital preservation of journal contents in online environment, where multiple publishers make their contents available thorough third party service providers. Many publishers also collaborate up with more than one journal aggregators and full-text databases for making archived contents available from multiple service points. In this Unit, characteristics and varieties of electronic journals and online research databases are discussed in details to help the learners in understanding availability of research literature as reliable proprietary electronic resources as well as open access resources in different platforms.

Last modified: Thursday, 25 March 2021, 10:44 AM