IBEROAMERICA: Portal of journals goes online

A portal that boasts nearly a million scientific articles journals from Latin America and the Caribbean, Spain and Portugal will now be available online for free. The service, which will provide access to full texts, was launched at the Autonomous University of Mexico (UNAM) on Tuesday.

The portal, dubbed the Latindex Portal of Portals (PPL), will be composed of 18 scientific, technical and cultural journal websites.

The sites include Dialnet, Redalyc and the peer-reviewed SciELO, as well as repositories of scientific journals from Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Cuba, Spain, Mexico, Peru and Colombia, and the Catalan open access web library RACO.

PPL was developed by UNAM's directorate of computing, information and communication technologies, with financial support from Mexico's National Council of Science and Technology and technical support from Canada's Public Knowledge Project (PKP).

The new project is part of Latindex, an Iberoamerican clearinghouse of scholarly magazines set up in 1997.

Latindex coordinator José Octavio Alonso-Gamboa, who works out of UNAM, told University World News that PPL will offer an improvement over the existing Latindex website, which links users to individual electronic magazines, since "it provides access in only one place to open-access portals that have stricter criteria for journal inclusion".

He believes these features will attract students, teachers and researchers. So far, Latindex's main users have been librarians, information professionals, subscription managers at scholarly journals and those specialising in publishing.