MedIND Presentation for ICADL 2013 in the Indian Digital Library Initiative (IDLI, scheduled on 11 Dec 2013) at ICADL 2013 at Le Meridien, Bangalore, 9-11 December 2013.

1. Sukhdev Singh
@esukhdev

3. MedIND
• MedIND = Medical Journals from INDia;
http://medind.nic.in
• Why?
– One point source for Free Full Text of Indexed Indian
Medical Journals
– To expose the Indian medical research literature globally
– Supplement Search Results of Indexing Service (IndMED)
by Cross Linking References with their Fulltext Articles
• Provide a world wide free access over the Web

4. Technology
• In-house developed solution.
• Server Side Includes (SSI) technology was used
to build portal of Medical Journals.
• Retrieval is through a Bibliographic Database
(IndMED – http://indmed.nic.in)
• PERL is used for CGI Scripts.
• Dynamic hyperlink with the “reference” when
the full text is available in MedIND.

5. Innovation / Novelty

6. First Indian Initiative
• One of the early initiatives to provide free full
text of indexed (IndMED / PubMed) Indian
Medical Journals over Internet in India.
• Portal made public way back in 2003
• Now 65 Indian Medical Journals covered in
MedIND
• MOUs with Journals. Thus no IPR issues.

7. Supplements IndMED
• Initiative was to supplement the indexing
service i.e. IndMED
• When full text article for a reference in
IndMED Search Result is available in MedIND,
hyperlink to full text article is shown

9. http://medind.nic.in/iby/t13/i4/ibyt13i4p785.pdf
Generated from Bibliographic Description

11. Journals’ Individualities Retained
• Journals’ editors wanted to get their “online
avatars” in lieu of parting with their full text
articles.
• Wanted to retain their journals’ their
hardcopy “feel and look” in their online
avatars.
• Thus, it was not a simple case of attaching full
text articles files to their respective indexed
bibliographic record (metadata).

12. • With such design constraints, MedIND was
conceived to be an aggregation of different
“online avatars” of participating medical
journals
• Common minimum elements for journals’
description
– SSI Templates used for these elements
• Available full text articles listed under
separate section facilitating Browsing

20. Explicit File Naming Policy
• Explicit documented ‘file naming and
organization’ policy.
– Journal Title = 3 Character Code
• Indian Journal of Medical Research = iby
– Year of Publication = 3 Character Code
• 2013 = t13
– Issue 4 = i4
– Article = Starting Page of Article
• P785

21. URLs Algorithmically Derived
• With ‘naming policy’ in place, the URL of a
particular full text article could algorithmically
derived from the bibliographical details of the
article.
http://medind.nic.in/iby/t13/i4/ibyt13i4p785.pdf
Generated from Bibliographic Description
• Indexing and Hosting of Fulltext articles are
separated

22. Impact of the Initiative
• This is one of the early initiatives of India
• Availability journals on web for free, helped
them to reach their international audience.
• Even the lesser known journals in the
company of better known journals being
served from single point got exposure.
• Increased their manuscript submission rate
and thus had liberty to select the best ones.

23. • Gradually with better quality paper
submissions with them and online exposure
their impact factors (where applicable)
gradually rose over the period.

24. Journals included in Directories

25. Initiative Referred

27. Thanks