Will be thankful if you kindly circulate the following important information on lis-forum A. Ratnakar New Delhi __________________________________________________________________________ World’s largest Open Access e-journals portal launched The placid and lackadaisical information infrastructure scenario of the country saw a momentous action on Monday the 27th of Feb, when world’s first e-journals portal Open J-Gate (www.openj-gate.com http://www.openj-gate.com/ ) was launched by Bangalore based Informatics (India) Ltd as a free service for everyone across the globe. Informatics called the launch as India's contribution to the global research and the promotion of open access movement. Open Access to journals is what Open Source is for software. As the name suggests access to open j-gate is free for any one to access across the world. It has enhanced the information access of researchers not only in India but all over the world. The occasion for this historic launch was the 12th Annual Lecture on Informatics at Indian National Academy of Sciences (INSA), where over 200 senior professors, scientists, librarians and researchers from most of the top research and academic establishments of the country had gathered. Dr Jean-Claude Guedon, a global expert of open access movement and founder of Internet Society of Canada launched the Open J-Gate who was sent by the Open Society Institute (OSI), New York for this launch. There are hundreds of journals, which are available from various publishers and societies from across the globe free on the Internet. But all of them are widely scattered and searching the articles and getting to them is a very cumbersome job for researchers. Open J-Gate is the first portal in the world to index over 3000+ open access e-journals on one single searchable platform in the form of a standard database bridging the access gap. The nearest comparable initiative by Lund University, Sweden, covers less than 600 open access e-journals. UGC Vice Chairman Prof V.N. Rajasekharan Pillai shared his ideas on open access issues that affect the most to the global scientific fraternity and lauded the efforts of Informatics immensely for launching open J-Gate; a portal direly needed by the resource starved Indian scientific community in particular. Dr. Guedon dwelled on the history of the open access movement and emphasized on the need of expanding the open access movement across the globe. He congratulated the CMD of Informatics Mr. N V sathyanaryana for his philanthropic venture and hailed Open J-Gate as a revolutionary step for the global scientific community at large. Open J-Gate has over a million articles published in 2,000 plus peer reviewed research journals in addition to articles from over 1,000 trade and professional journals. The data base can be accessed at the URL www.openj-gate.com http://www.openj-gate.com/