Chennai: Thousands of engineering students from about 100 engineering colleges have not received access to e-journals and e-books despite paying the subscription fee for the 2025-26 academic year. These colleges paid the subscription fee for students under the Anna University E-Resource Consortium model last year.Colleges said they neither got access to e-journals nor received a refund from Anna University (AU) so far.
Under the e-consortium model, BE and BTech students will get access to more than 20,000 e-books and 4,000 e-journals by paying 500 a year. Meanwhile, ME and MTech students paid 1,500 for the access. The trial access to journals and books ended in June last year.While 300 engineering colleges expressed willingness to be part of the e-resource consortium, 100 colleges paid the subscription fee to the university. Anna University decided to hold back the e-consortium following opposition from some engineering colleges.“The colleges were provided with access to e-journals and e-books till last year. Since the subscription fee was paid to the university, we could not provide access to students for this academic year,” the principal of a private engineering college said.Final-year students, post-graduate students, and research scholars use e-journals and e-books for their projects and research. These colleges had paid subscription fees ranging from around 10 lakh to 25 lakh. “Despite sending several reminders to the university, we are yet to get the refund. A timely refund would have helped us subscribe to them individually,” another college principal said.A senior official from the higher education department said the issue was discussed at the syndicate meeting of Anna University. “Some colleges did not want to be part of the consortium. So, we do not want to force this on the colleges. We directed the university to refund the amount to all colleges,” the official said.Anna University Registrar (in charge) V Kumaresan said that the university would refund the journal subscription fee for these colleges within a week.
