[Bioline-l] Happy New Year & Greetings from Bioline International

[Bioline International]

Dear Friends and Collaborators,

Happy New Year and greetings from the Bioline International team in
Canada! We hope you and yours have enjoyed a wonderful year and are
looking forward to 2005. 

The past year has been an extremely busy and productive one for Bioline
International and the Bioline project has progressed by leaps and bounds
as we added new journals, improved website features and increased our
focus on mirroring Bioline journal material on our OAI compliant EPrints
archive (http://bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca/). 

In January, 2004, Bioline took the plunge and declared full-fledged
support for the Open Access movement by converting all available
material to open access. Though a number of long standing Bioline
journals were lost in this conversion (previously paid-access material),
we were soon able to add a wide variety of new material from committed
open-access publishers all over the developing world. We now proudly
host journal material from over thirty active publishers and are being
contacted by other interested publishers on a regular basis. 

Bioline was an active player in the launching of the Directory of Open
Access Journals (http://www.doaj.org), in February 2004. When the DOAJ
was launched, a large number of Bioline journals were already included
in the database, and new Bioline additions are added to the directory as
they occur. The DOAJ project has considerably improved the visibility of
Bioline journals over the Internet, and Bioline continues to pursue new
ways to further promote our journals.

In the spring of 2004, the Bioline team focused on depositing PDF
versions of Bioline content to the Bioline Eprints server
(http://bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca). This server is fully OAI compliant,
and is harvested by services such as OAIster (http://www.oaister.org/).
Along with the DOAJ, such directories and search engines provide
excellent coverage of our journals, and users are able to search and
locate Bioline content through dedicated, scholarly search engines as
well as through popular search engines such as Google. 

Summer and fall brought a number of new journal titles to the Bioline
family, and we have been working hard to process these journals and add
their back files to the Bioline website, as well as the Eprints server
for better exposure.  We continue to work with new journals and will
likely have a number of new titles available early in 2005.

ISI Current Web Content has recently included the publications
distributed by Bioline International in its coverage. This is a very
encouraging development for the participating journals, all of which are
generated in developing and emerging countries. It indicates the high
standards of the content as applied by ISI to the authority, accuracy,
currency, scope and navigational quality of the journals.

We cannot summarize the 2004 year without mention of our dedicated
publishers, who have worked extensively with the Bioline team to add new
(and back filed) issues of their publications to the Bioline website.
Bioline publishers have shown their strong support for the Open Access
movement, and many are reporting increased paper submissions and
readership since their addition to the Bioline project.   Many of these
publishers must work with unreliable internet access and resources to
transfer their journal issues to the Bioline staff and their efforts are
greatly appreciated. Without them, we would have no new content to add
to the website!

Overall, we are very pleased with the progression of the Bioline project
in the year 2004. We have an increasing team of dedicated students
working on the project under the careful watch of the management team
from the Department of Social Sciences at the University of Toronto at
Scarborough - Associate Director, Prof. Leslie Chan and Project
Coordinator, Jen Sweezie. The dedicated support and collaboration from
our hard working colleagues at the Reference Center on Environmental
Information, Brazil (http://www.cria.org.br/) has yet again been the
mainstay of the Bioline project. 

We are looking ahead to the upcoming 2005 year with anticipation.  We
hope to launch a new design for the Bioline website early in the New
Year. The site design is almost finished and we are working hard to
ensure every little detail is properly handled before we introduce the
new site. As well, we are almost ready to produce the very first Bioline
International CD-Rom, which we hope to distribute to libraries in the
developing world that do not have reliable internet access.  

We thank you again and again for your continued interest and support for
the Bioline International project.   We wish you all the best for the
upcoming year, and hope you will enjoy watching the Bioline
International progress through another landmark year!



Jen Sweezie
Project Coordinator
Bioline International
------------------------------------
c/o Division of Social Sciences
University of Toronto at Scarborough
1265 Military Trail, Scarborough, ON
M1C 1A4 -- Canada

bioline.international@utoronto.ca
http://www.bioline.org.br/
See our new eprints server: http://bioline.utsc.utoronto.ca/