RELEASE OF OPEN ACCESS RESOURCES REVIEW ARTICLE ON THE OCCASION OF OPEN ACCESS WEEK

While celebrating Open Access Week, we are happy to release our article entitled
"Open access journals, magazines and other information sources for
scholarly literature in pharmaceutical education, research and
pharmacy practice". The article is published in "Research in Pharmaceutical Sciences, April 2008; 3(1): 1-20". The Journal Research in Pharmaceutical Sciences is an Open Access Journal available at http://journals.mui.ac.ir/rps. The full text pdf is available for free to download at http://journals.mui.ac.ir/rps/article/view/4205/1766

We hope that the article will be useful to pharmacy students, teachers, industry and pharmacists.


THE ABSTRACT OF THE ARTICLE IS AS FOLLOWS:

The open access (OA) to scholarly articles published in journals, magazines and other literature sources is extremely useful to pharmacy students, teachers, research scholars, scientists and pharmacists to update their knowledge with recent changes in their fields of Specialization. Open access (OA) to scholarly articles is provided either directly from journal homepages by the publishers or from repositories where publishers submit these articles to promote OA. Apart from these online repositories for thesis, online resources trials,sample copies of journals, free back files, author funded OA of individual articles are other important online resources for information retrieval. International organizations have also started initiatives to provide free or low cost access to online journals in developing countries. Searching internet for information requirements in specialized disciplines is becoming easier with the advancement of search engines through specialized and custom search engine facilities. Authors searched Internet with the help of various general purpose search engines, like google, yahoo, and live search, to find out URLs of websites of journals, magazines, science and technology publishers, pharmaceutical societies, and online repositories which provide open access to scholarly articles and other useful and authentic drug information in pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences disciplines. Authors visited all these websites to confirm their free accessibility and their free contents available. Thereafter these journals, magazines and other literature sources are segregated according to their specialization and provided in this article. Open access journal full text links have been provided for 235 journals and 49 magazines in disciplines of pharmaceutics, pharmacology, toxicology, physiology, clinical pharmacy, epidemiology, chemistry, pharmacognosy, microbiology, biotechnology, bioinformatics and multidisciplinary pharmaceutical sciences. Websites for online drug information resources, and repositories which provide full text thesis have also been compiled. This article reviews most OA resources with special reference to the disciplines of pharmacy and pharmaceutical sciences.