EBSCO Information Services (EBSCO) has announced that it is making the government database ERIC, the Education Resource Information Center, freely available during the government shutdown. ERIC is typically available through its government website as well as via EBSCO’s EBSCOhost research platform. Since the government site is unavailable during the shutdown, EBSCO will temporarily open its version of ERIC and make it available for free online.
“We know our users who access ERIC on EBSCOhost find it to be a valuable resource and we understand that having access to a resource like ERIC shut off handicaps some researchers,” company President Tim Collins says in the announcement. “Therefore, we have decided to provide this temporary access in order to assist these researchers.”
ERIC provides access to educational literature and resources including access to information from journals included in the Current Index of Journals in Education and Resources in Education Index. It was designed as a national information system to provide access to education literature and resources.
ERIC, which dates back to 1966, provides more than 1.4 million bibliographic records.
Because of the shutdown, access to the full text of articles and other materials will not be available but researchers will have access to the full set of A&I records on EBSCOhost. Users going to the site above will now see ERIC listed among the other free EBSCO databases such as GreenFILE and Library, Information Science & Technology Abstracts (LISTA).