OhioLINK launches upgraded Electronic Journal Center

OhioLINK has officially launched its significantly upgraded Electronic Journal Center (EJC), giving OhioLINK students, faculty and researchers enhanced access to a vast, rich array of high-quality research journals.

The EJC is a database that contains 26 million full-text articles from more than 11,000 academic journals from top scholarly publishers, academic societies and university presses. The project was made possible through a $1 million capital expenditure from the State of Ohio funded through the Ohio Department of Higher Education’s Technology Initiatives.

The upgrade is a significant enhancement in infrastructure and interface, providing new features, such as full-text searching, multiple saved article lists and access to PDFs directly from the search results. 

“I commend OhioLINK for taking an already important tool and making it even more effective to meet the research needs of thousands of Ohioans,” Chancellor John Carey said.

Access to superb published research is a key component in Ohio research institutions’ continuing success in supporting innovative research activity on campuses and winning funding from industry and such programs as the National Science Foundation and National Institutes of Health. It’s also a potent recruiting tool to attract graduate students, faculty and researchers to Ohio institutions.

“The EJC upgrade represents a months-long project for the OhioLINK and OH-TECH staff aimed at providing unrivaled research information capabilities,” said Gwen Evans, executive director of OhioLINK. “The EJC is just one of many resources offered by OhioLINK that serves as the raw material for inspiration and invention on Ohio’s higher education campuses and advanced research facilities.”

Like its predecessor, the new EJC searches across descriptive information such as an article’s title, author and abstract. But the new version also searches the complete text of an article. The result is more relevant and expanded search results for the user. In addition to full text searching, the new EJC allows many time-saving and personalization options. Users can create multiple lists of articles for later reference, save searches and set up an email alert to be notified when favorite journals publish new articles.

Each week, more than 50,000 newly published articles are loaded into the EJC from publishers such as Elsevier, Wiley, Oxford and Institute of Physics, among others. OhioLINK users download 10 million article PDFs a year from the EJC and publisher websites, which are also accessible to OhioLINK users.

"As members of OhioLINK, we are very excited about the new EJC platform, which features major interface changes that improve usability for both our patrons and our library staff,” said Jennifer Bazeley, coordinator of collection access and acquisitions at Miami University Libraries. “The new EJC meets 21st century user needs and allows us to evolve with greater agility to address future changes in library technologies."

OhioLINK is a member of the Ohio Technology Consortium (OH-TECH), the technology and information division of the Ohio Department of Higher Education. The EJC upgrade was a priority project of OH-TECH’s Shared Infrastructure team, which helped facilitate the project in many ways, including leveraging Ohio Supercomputer Center systems to simulate millions of hits on the EJC platform for stress testing.