The Library
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Prince Leopold Institute of Tropical Medicine
The Library |
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This page aims to explain some of the major trends in current day offerings
of electronic full-text journal editions. To actually access individual
journals, click on the Electronic journals
link at the top and bottom of each ITG library webpage. This produces a listing
of several hundreds of (fully or partially) electronic journals,
including active links and indicating the degree of their availability.
Journal Portals
The ITG library has currently registered with several collective electronic
journal portals: all American Society of Microbiology (ASM) journals,
the full biomedical collection of Blackwell Science journals, the
Biomedical Reference Collection of EbscoHost, and a selection
from Elsevier ScienceDirect Web Editions
are now available from within ITG premises.
Click here for detailed up-to-date information.
Individual Journals
Many biomedical journals are now offering full-text editions from their
(publisher's) website, often with attractive results (e.g. journals
associated with Stanford Univeristy's HighWire
Press initiative).
This, however, does not imply that all journals are already present on the
World Wide Web, nor that for all the printed journals the ITG library
subscribes to, the electronic versions can be accessed for free. Also, full-text
editions are often limited to the last 5 publication years or so, or conversely,
have an embargo on the most recent issues (e.g. 6 months). Broadly speaking,
three distinctive "electronic full-text" categories can be distinguished:
The most liberal (and smallest) group offers full-text contents for free to everybody, so no intervention of intermediaries like libraries is required. Yet individual registration may be necessary. When prompted for a username and a password, the combination "itguser", "itguser" may work, depending on the specific journal or intermediary. If this combination does not work, you can best register for yourself.
Some examples:
Various newsletters and vital statistics publications are offered freely on the Internet, and thus belong to this group:
Some examples:
Free access limited to older issues: an increasing number of publishers, like the American Society for Microbiology (ASM) or those partaking in the PubMed Central initiative, give free access to the full-text editions of their journals, except for the last six months or so. In January 2005, "Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA", for instance, would be available up to the June 2004 issue:
Remember that for the ASM journals ITG now also subscribes to the most recent issues
There's also a new group of over 100 free electronic-only peer-reviewed BioMed Central journals:
Some examples:
Full-text contents are available to (institutional) subscribers to the printed
journal. The ITG library has registered site licences for such
electronic journals where applicable (unfortunately ever more publishers abandon
this fair principle and demand additional payment (see section 3)).
Most journals in this category will verify access authorisation by
checking the requesting computer's IP-address - which works fine as long
as your IP-number does belong to the IP-range known to the librarians and
registered with the electronic journal hosts. Some of these journals may ask
for a username and a password (sometimes only the first time you access them).
These are not the same for all the journals in this category.
So if the most popular username and password combination "itguser",
"itguser" is not accepted by particular journals, contact the library
for more appropriate combinations
(but please don't try to (re)register or change any parameters by yourself -
this will only mess things up for everybody).
Some examples:
Full-text contents are available only to (institutional) subscribers
paying extra for the electronic version (e.g.
ASM (for the most recent journal issues), Blackwell Science
(ITG subscribes to the complete biomedical collection), Cambridge University
Press, and Elsevier journals).
ITG library policy: while we aim to register for electronic versions
where applicable, we can afford to pay additional subscription fees for
online access only for a selection of journals.
Some examples:
The ITG library website features a survey of over
1000 of (fully or partially) electronic journals, indicating their
degree of availability (e.g. electronic tables of contents only vs. electronic
full-text articles, etc.) and offering 'clickable' links.
To access this list, just click on the
Electronic journals link at the top and bottom of each ITG library page,
or go directly to http://lib.itg.be/journals.htm.
Please note that although this list is regularly updated, URLs and levels of
service offered by these electronic journal web sites may change
faster than we can keep track of.
Technically, these full-text versions are generally offered in plain
HTML or in PDF format, the latter featuring the original
lay-out of the printed document.
To view these PDF documents, you need to install Acrobat Reader software,
which is available for free on the Internet (from
Adobe).
Some publishers, however, use other formats (e.g. RealPage) which may
require installation of additional software.
But please don't get excited too soon: while the World Wide Web works wonders
when working well, it is not realistic to expect everything to always go
smoothly: addresses may change, servers may be down (temporarily or
definitively), full-text files may be quite large, connections may be
unacceptably slow and the promised "full contents" may be disappointingly
selective or limited.
| ITG library | Dirk Schoonbaert at "bib@itg.be" or tel. "240". |
| Veerle Demedts at "vdemedts@itg.be" or tel. "241". | |
| Noor Goemaere at "ngoemaere@itg.be" or tel. "244". | |
| Kris Didden; at "kdidden@itg.be" or tel. "244". |
| ITG library home page | eBooks | Journals | Electronic journals | Databases | WebSPIRS | Internet links | ITG home page |