The Scholars Portal technological infrastructure preserves and provides access to information resources collected and shared by Ontario university libraries.
Scholars Portal is a service of OCUL and was founded in 2002.
Through Scholars Portal online services, university students, faculty and researchers have access to an extensive and varied collection of e-journals, e-books, social science datasets, geo reference data and geospatial data. Scholars Portal also offers a bilingual virtual chat reference service and other tools designed to aid and enhance academic research in Ontario and beyond.
Scholars Portal Services
Accessible Content E-Portal (ACE)
ACE is a growing repository of accessible format texts available to users with print disabilities at participating institutions in Ontario.
Ask a Librarian
Ask a Librarian is a bilingual virtual reference service that connects students, faculty and researchers from participating libraries with real-time research assistance through chat.
Books
The Scholars Portal e-book platform is designed to provide a single interface for accessing digital texts from the world's most important scholarly publishers and public domain books that have been digitized for online reading.
Borealis
Borealis is a research data management and sharing platform that allows for secure deposit, flexible sharing, and exploration and visualization of research data collected by individuals and organizations associated with affiliated universities.
GeoPortal
Scholars GeoPortal is an award-winning geospatial data discovery tool, allowing Ontario's university students and researchers of all disciplines to enrich their teaching and research with a single point of access and retrieval to a curated collection of maps and geospatial datasets.
Journals
Scholars Portal Journals is a digital repository of over 65 million scholarly articles drawn from journals covering every academic discipline. A small but growing number of journals are open access and available to anyone. Scholars Portal Journals is certified as a Trustworthy Digital Repository for long-term preservation.
Odesi
Odesi is a web-based data exploration and analysis tool. A unique partnership between university libraries, business and government, Odesi greatly improves access to statistical social survey and polling data for researchers, teachers and students.
Ontario Library Research Cloud (OLRC)
OLRC is a collaboration of Ontario’s university libraries to build a high capacity, geographically distributed storage and compute network using proven and scalable open-source cloud technologies.
Permafrost
Permafrost is a hosted digital preservation service that provides a suite of tools, training and resources to enable OCUL member libraries to begin actively processing digital objects for long-term preservation and access.
Publishing
Scholars Portal hosts Open Journal Systems and Open Monograph Press for 12 Ontario institutions, with over 150 active journals containing more than 45,000 published articles. This service includes software hosting, troubleshooting, upgrades and Crossref sponsorship for DOI minting.
Scholaris
Scholaris is a national shared repository service that provides scalable infrastructure, technical expertise and community support for institutional repositories in Canada.
For More Information
Visit scholarsportal.info to learn more about Scholars Portal services.