Students to get free access to e-books

College students across India will now get free access to e-journals and e-books from all over the world with the human resource development ministry subscribing to them.

College students across India will now get free access to e-journals and e-books from all over the world with the human resource development ministry subscribing to them.

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Over 2,000 journals have been subscribed to by the ministry under the project titled N-List (National Library and Information Services Infrastructure for Scholarly Content). These will be provided to students in various colleges free of cost.

“It is a part of the ICT (information and communication technology) initiatives of the government. The resources include more than 2,100 e-journals and 51,000 e-books,” a ministry official told IANS.

The scheme covers premier technical institutions like IITs, IISc, IISERs and NITs along with 6,000 government and government aided colleges across the country. Private institutions are also eligible for membership on the payment of a fee.

“We have already covered over 1,200 colleges across the country. They have been given the logins and passwords,” the official said.

Government colleges have to pay Rs 5,000 as annual membership fee while private colleges will have to pay an annual subscription of Rs 46,000. The facility will, however, be free for the students.

“For the colleges getting financial aid from the UGC, the expenditure will be met by the HRD ministry,” the official said.

The e-resources include publications from American Institute of Physics, American Physical Society, Annual Reviews, Cambridge University Press, Oxford University Press, Royal Society of Chemistry and Tata McGraw Hill, along with major Indian journals and publications.