Dr. Mohammad Hassanzadeh said in a conversation with Mehr reporter about the status of universities’ access to international databases: Due to financial problems, there was 17 years of accumulated debt to databases, and universities’ access to databases was cut off for 5 years. With the support provided at the national level, Irandak, as the scientific resources supply council of the country, pursued this issue and settled a major part of Elsevier’s debts by getting a suitable discount.
He continued: After that, from August 20, universities were provided trial access to two valuable products of Scopus AI and Science Direct for 2 months. After this subscription expired, we began our efforts to purchase new one-year subscriptions. Administrative work and the bureaucratic process did not allow the purchase of new subscriptions until October 20 (the end of the two-month temporary subscription).
Referring to the re-extension of the temporary access for two weeks, the head of the Scientific Resources Supply Council of the country added: Considering that our negotiations were proceeding with positive databases and in a constructive atmosphere, we did not allow the trial access of the universities to be cut off and we extended the trial access again.
He explained about the status of purchasing a new one-year subscription for universities: with the support of Dr. Simai Saraf and his deputies and the country’s program and budget organization and with the special assistance of Dr. Aref; The first vice president (in the form of a margin he did at the request of the Ministry of Science), provided funding for the purchase of new subscriptions for universities that applied for these services, and currently a one-year subscription contract has been signed and universities applying for subscriptions to Scopus artificial intelligence and Science Direct has access.
Hassanzadeh pointed out: In this partnership, the applicant universities, in addition to having access to Scopus as a reference for citation analysis and scientometrics and a gateway to full-text resources, can also use artificial intelligence capabilities. Using Scopus artificial intelligence, researchers can interactively use scientific resources using GPT chat capabilities.
The head of the Research Institute of Information Science and Technology of Iran (IranDAC) emphasized: Now that we are in the budget season, we must consider a centralized line in the budget to finance access to scientific resources. This proposal was made by the Ministry of Science and we hope that with the support of the Ministry of Science, the Program and Budget Organization of the country and the Islamic Council, this centralized row will be established to finance access to scientific resources. This concentrated row will help us to have no problem in providing academic resources to universities in the coming years.
According to him; The consultation to purchase subscriptions to other scientific databases is ongoing.
According to Mehr; Elsevier is one of the largest scientific publications in the world, whose central branch is located in Amsterdam (the capital of the Netherlands). Science Direct and Scopus are both shared access scientific databases owned by Elsevier. Scopus AI is an intelligent search tool powered by generative artificial intelligence (GenAI). Using the network of linguistic concepts and the structure of natural language, this tool provides the possibility of keyword searches and providing answers created by artificial intelligence.
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