The Ontario Council of University Libraries (OCUL) is proud to announce that our Scholars Portal Journals platform has loaded its 50 millionth journal article.
Scholars Portal Journals provides students, faculty and researchers at Ontario’s universities easy access to articles on a wide range of academic subjects through a bilingual search interface. Users can save and export lists of relevant journal articles, or set up an email alert to be notified when new, relevant articles are added. Scholars Portal Journals grew out of a locally hosted journal platform first deployed at the University of Toronto Libraries in the 1990s, became an OCUL service in 2002, was completely redesigned and adopted an early version of the JATS metadata standard in 2006, and was certified as the first Trusted Digital Repository in Canada in 2013.
As an OCUL service, Journals started out with a modest collection of just over 1 million articles from a few major publishers. Growth has been constant since then, reaching 50 million articles this year – the year of OCUL’s 50th anniversary – with the addition of several large collections of Open Access content, including 1,487 journal titles from PubMed Central and 330 from De Gruyter Open. Users can easily limit searches of the platform to only display Open Access content, and all of the Open Access journals on the platform can be viewed at https://journals.scholarsportal.info/openAccess
This achievement points to the importance OCUL places on preserving and providing access to high-quality scholarly resources for Ontario’s researchers and students. A unique resource built through a unique collaboration, Scholars Portal is one of the largest aggregations of scholarly content in the world and a critical preservation service for Ontario’s universities, with nearly 70% of the articles stored for long-term preservation in our Trusted Digital Repository. OCUL would like to acknowledge the participation and assistance of all those scholarly publishers willing to partner with us over the last two decades in building this important service.
“This milestone is particularly momentous given that OCUL is currently celebrating 50 years of collaboration,” says Ken Hernden, University Librarian at Algoma University and OCUL Chair. “Ontario university libraries remain committed to providing our students and researchers with a large, comprehensive, and high-quality collection of scholarly materials, as well as preserving this digital scholarship for future generations.”
“Two decades of collecting and preserving scholarly journals has produced a resource of unique value for the Ontario academic community,” says Alan Darnell, Director of Scholars Portal. “As researchers adopt new methods to mine data from large bodies of content, Scholars Portal Journals will be available not just as a resource for reading but as a record of scholarship that researchers will be able to explore computationally.”
To access Scholars Portal Journals please visit: journals.scholarsportal.info
To learn more about the Trusted Digital Repository please visit: journals.scholarsportal.info/tdr