Free, Full-Text, Scholarly Journals on the Web

In the November, 2000 issue of College & Research Libraries, Michael Fesmire and Elizabeth Young had a fascinating article entitled, Free Scholarly Electronic Journals: What Access Do College and University Libraries Provide? In the article, they discussed the rapid growth of these free, academic, peer-reviewed journals on the Internet that covered all different subject areas. Through careful effort, the authors had located over 200 scholarly, full-text, peer reviewed journals, many of which were indexed in major services such as ERIC, Medline, MathSciNet, INSPEC, and C henucal Abstracts. They also noted, though, that most college and university libraries were not making use of these free resources

Does Urquhart’s Law Hold for Consortial Use of Electronic Journals?

This paper tests the validity of Urquhart’s Law (“the inter-library loan demand for a periodical is as a rule a measure of its total use”). It compares the use of print journals at the Turkish Academic Network and Information Center (ULAKBIM) with the consortial use of the same journals in their electronic form by the individual libraries making up the Consortium of Turkish University Libraries (ANKOS). It also compares the on-site use of electronic journals at ULAKBIM with their consortial use at ANKOS. About 700 thousand document delivery, in-house and on-site use data and close to 28 million consortial use data representing seven years’ worth of downloads of full-text journal articles were used. Findings validate Urquhart’s Law in that a positive correlation was observed between the use of print journals at ULAKBIM and the consortial use of their electronic copies at ANKOS. The on-site and consortial use of electronic journals was also highly correlated. Both print and electronic journals that were used most often at ULAKBIM tend to get used heavily by the member libraries of ANKOS consortium, too. Findings can be used in developing consortial collection management policies and negotiate better consortial licence agreements

The Determinants, Nature and Value of Electronic Information Intermediation

While the Internet is capable of supporting non- mediated relationships between producers and users of information, most medical information that is disseminated though the Internet is mediated. A variety of information intermediariesi provide mediated medical information on the Internet that helps physicians (decision-makers) and patients (decision-receivers) in clinical decision-making (Detmer and Shortliffe, 1997; Ferguson, 1996; Goldstein and Flory, 1997). These intermediaries include web-based medical literature providers, Internet patient records providers, integrated medical information providers, electronic journals and web-based medical support/ discussion/ chat groups, who perform the task of information intermediation. Some of these are just Internet-automated versions of traditional forms of information intermediation (e.g. electronic journals) while others are new forms of information intermediation (e.g. web-based discussion groups)

Electronic Publishing Versus Publishing Electronically: The Case of EC World C A Forum for the 21st Century

Electronic journals today typically serve as on-line counterparts of their paper based versions, providing abstracts, manuscript tracking, and announcements of forthcoming issues (see Denning 1995; Jog 1995). Some e-journals and magazines also provide “live” materials such as audio/video clips, basic World Wide Web interactivity, or even customization of content and presentation. However, a majority of these ventures seek to use the Internet and the Web as an efficient medium of content distribution and presentation. It thus appears that the broadcast model of television (O’Reilly 1996) has been most widely adopted by the creators of e-journals (Chellappa, Barua and Whinston 1996a). However, the global scope of the Internet and the open nature of its applications enable us to rethink the publishing process itself and to redesign the way content is created (i.e., authored, reviewed, validated, and published). In other words, publishing electronically (making content available on-line without changing processes that support content creation) is not the same as electronic publishing, which seeks to redesign the processes themselves. True electronic publishing can lead not only to improved knowledge dissemination, but can also help create new knowledge through successive refinement and longitudinal argument-based interactions between authors, readers, and other experts

STARGATE : Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit. Final Project Report

STARGATE (Static Repository Gateway and Toolkit) was funded by the Joint Information Systems Committee (JISC) and is intended to demonstrate the ease of use of the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting (OAI-PMH) Static Repository technology, and the potential benefits offered to publishers in making their metadata available in this way This technology offers a simpler method of participating in many information discovery services than creating fully-fledged OAI-compliant repositories. It does this by allowing the infrastructure and technical support required to participate in OAI-based services to be shifted from the data provider (the journal) to a third party and allows a single third party gateway provider to provide intermediation for many data providers (journals). Specifically, STARGATE has created a series of Static Repositories of publisher metadata provided by a selection of Library and Information Science journals. It has demonstrated the interoperability of these repositories by exposing their metadata via a Static Repository Gateway for harvesting and cross-searching by external service providers. The project has conducted a critical evaluation of the Static Repository approach in conjunction with the participating publishers and service providers. The technology works. The project has demonstrated that Static Repositories are easy to create and that the differences between fully-fledged and static OAI Repositories have no impact on the participation of small journal publishers in OAI-based services. The problems for a service that arise out of the use of Static Repositories are parallel to those created by any other repository dealing with journal articles. Problems arise from the diversity of metadata element sets provided by a given journal and the lack of specific metadata elements for the articles' volume and issue details. Another issue for the use of publishers' metadata arise as the collection policies of some existing services only allow Open Access materials to be included in them. The project recommends that the use of Static Repositories continues to be explored - in particular as a flexible way to expose existing sets of structured information to OAI services and to create the opportunity to enhance the metadata as part of the process. The project further recommends that the publishing community consider the creation or adoption of an application profile for journal articles to support information discovery that can search by volume and issue. Significant further use of the Static Repository technology by small journal publishers will require the future creation and maintenance of a community-specific Static Repository Gateway. Further use will also require advocacy within the publishing community but might initially be most effectively kick-started through the creation of OAI repositories based on metadata held by the commercial services which publish or mediate access to electronic copies of journals on behalf of small publishers

Competition and cooperation: Libraries and publishers in the transition to electronic scholarly journals

The conversion of scholarly journals to digital format is proceeding rapidly, especially for those from large commercial and learned society publishers. This conversion offers the best hope for survival for such publishers. The infamous "journal crisis" is more of a library cost crisis than a publisher pricing problem, with internal library costs much higher than the amount spent on purchasing books and journals. Therefore publishers may be able to retain or even increase their revenues and profits, while at the same time providing a superior service. To do this, they will have to take over many of the function of libraries, and they can do that only in the digital domain. This paper examines publishers' strategies, how they are likely to evolve, and how they will affect libraries

Print or Perish? Authors’ Attitudes Toward Electronic-Only Publication of Law Journals

An increasing number of U.S. law journals post at least current issues in freely accessible PDF and (in some cases) HTML formats on their web sites. Yet, perhaps without exception, the journals that make their articles freely available on their websites also continue to publish print issues in the face of declining subscription numbers, and law libraries\u27 growing disinterest in collecting and preserving journals in print. As universities reduce staff, freeze open positions, eliminate salary increases, and cut library budgets, why have law schools continued to subsidize print publication of journals that are accessible in electronic formats? Among the reasons suggested for this is the possible impact on a journals reputation and ability to attract authors if it moved to electronic-only publication. This paper reports on the results of a survey of law journal authors\u27 attitudes toward electronic-only law journals

Surprising Subscriptions: How Electronic Journal Publishing Has Affected the Partnership Among Subscription Agents, Publishers and Librarians

This compilation is a mixture of papers submitted by speakers and text derived from notes taken by the moderator and Mary Hawks of the University of Arkansas for Medical Sciences Library and has been reviewed by the participants

Hidden Under a Bushel? Evangelical Journals in an Era of Web-Based Communications

Evangelicals face significant obstacles as they seek to make their publications accessible to potential readers. This study measures the extent to which evangelical scholarly journals have made their contents available in electronic form. Thirty-five journals – all active, refereed, evangelical in perspective, and published in English – were chosen for analysis. Two serials management tools and individual journal Web sites provided data regarding electronic accessibility. Twenty-six of the journals are available in some electronic form – most commonly in one or more aggregated databases. Evangelical information professionals could play a significant role in helping to make additional evangelical journal content available electronically

E-Journals and the Big Deal: A Review of the Literature

Faced with shrinking budgets and increased subscription prices, many academic libraries are seeking ways to reduce the cost of e-journal access. A common target for cuts is the “Big Deal,” or large bundled subscription model, a term coined by Kenneth Frazier in a 2001 paper criticizing the effects of the Big Deal on the academic community. The purpose of this literature review is to examine issues related to reducing e-journal costs, including criteria for subscription retention or cancellation, decision-making strategies, impacts of cancellations, and other options for e-journal content provision. Commonly used criteria for decision-making include usage statistics, overlap analysis, and input from subject specialists. The most commonly used strategy for guiding the process and aggregating data is the rubric or decision grid. While the e-journal landscape supports several access models, such as Pay-Per-View, cloud access, and interlibrary loan, the Big Deal continues to dominate. Trends over the past several years point to dwindling support for the Big Deal however, due largely to significant annual rate increases and loss of content control