The new platform for Sri Lanka Journals Online (SLJOL) marked its official release in Sri Lanka on Thursday, 10th March 2016 at the National Science Foundation (NSF) Sri Lanka in the presence of the Minister for Science, Technology and Research Hon. Susil Premajayantha. 

Prof. Sirimali Fernando Chairperson of NSF speaking at the launch said: “I thank all the editors who have joined the SLJOL database and welcome more journals to join us. This is a great opportunity to bring Sri Lankan research to the world”.

55 journal editors, Scientists, Information professionals and local media, as well as staff from the National Science Foundation, INASP’s Sioux Cumming and Brian Hole from Ubiquity Press were present at the event.  

Addressing participants, The Hon. Minister noted; This kind of endeavor(s) provides great opportunities for scholars in accessing research and information and mobilize their knowledge to everyone. These are the new paradigms of open access development for electronic information resources and publications and open new era for internet learner”.

SLJOL was initiated in August 2008 and is a project managed by the National Science Foundation (NSF) and supported by the International Network for the Availability of Scientific Publication (INASP). It aims to promote the awareness and use of Sri Lankan-published journals in all disciplines by providing access to tables of contents (TOCs), abstracts and full text on the Internet.

The launch event was followed by a two-day workshop on ‘Using SLJOL for Journal Editors’ which was attended by the various editors of the journals available on the platform. “The workshop aim (s) to train the journal staff to load their own content onto SLJOL and manage the peer-review process in an online environment,” said Sioux Cumming, Programme Manager, Journals Online at INASP.  

The workshop, which is locally organized by NSF, also introduced participants to Digital Object Identifiers (DOIs) and the method for their inclusion in manuscripts and discussed copyright, plagiarism, legal issues and permissions involved in the publication of a journal.

“This was a very practical, hands-on workshop. The journal quality aspects are relevant to all journals, but the use of SLJOL is specifically designed for the journals already present on SLJOL,” added Sioux.

The SLJOL platform is a free resource that can be accessed by any citizen and is available on www.sljol.info. To follow updates on the platform on Twitter, see the hashtag #SLJOL.