A sister service to ThaiScience and the inspiration for our establishment, Bioline is a collaboration between the University of Toronto and the Reference Center on Environmental Information in Brazil. The service offers a wide range of online journals, particularly from developing countries, with a focus on South America and Africa. In addition to general science, medical and health publications are also covered and a search facility provided.

Dedicated to the promotion of free access to medical journals over the Internet, FreeMedicalJournals has three classes of publications available (free 1-6 months, free 1 year, free 2 years, after publication) and provides an alert service. Most journals are from the USA, including the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. A useful service for the medical field, although most of the material is probably available through PubMed.

A major service covering over 1,600 journals, of which over 400 may be searched at the article level. Currently about 75,000 articles are store, many of which relate to science and technology. Multiple languages are available apart from English and worldwide coverage is given. An initiative of Lund University, DOAJ only includes free access publications and does not include journals that have an embargo period. Easy to browse or search and a well laid out site.

US National Institutes of Health free digital archive of biomedical and life sciences journal literature. A huge repository with good search and browsing facilities, PubMed also includes delayed publication journals. If there is a fault, it is perhaps that PubMed has too much information and users need to be adept at refining their search. In most cases downloading can be undertaken from the journal direct or from PubMed. BioMed is an arm of PubMed and publishes over 100 free access journals in all areas of biology and medicine. PubMed remains the standard resource for most researchers.