Electronic Journals

[Jim Morgan]

Prt of the problem of the "free" journals is that their polices seem to be
in flux.  We get a number of advertisements from medical publishers of
journals that are free until a certain date, others that have a few
articles free but charge for others, and still others that offer abstracts
but require payment for the complete text. 

We've wound up creating one list for journals to which our users have full
access to all online articles (by some sort of login code or IP number)
plus journals which seem likely to remain free (such as government
publications) and a second list which simply lists all biomedical online
journals of interest to our users.

The second more complete list is just our way of saying to our users "You
can get to this journal online, but you may or may not be able to get to
full-text articles" depending on the current policy of the publisher.

Of course in all cases the online offerings are limited.  Except for those
journals that were produced online from the start, very few journals seem
to have their entire archive online.  And we haven't yet been able to
offer our users evaluations of the quality of the online journal.
Information about the completeness of the material - the availability of
illustrations, tables, editorial material and advertising - would be
useful but is time-consuming to collect.

Jim Morgan
morganj at iupui.edu


On Wed, 12 Nov 1997, Peter C. Gorman wrote:

> Marty Tanner Hughes writes:
> 
> >but with Project Muse and JSTOR subscriptions and various publishers
> >offering all of their titles online, the numbers seem to demand a different
> >approach.
> 
> We, too were faced with an ever-growing list of E-journal titles, so we
> decided to take the individual journal titles off our main resource menus
> and provide access to them through our catalog (we have a web interface)
> instead. For the time being, we're still providing collection-level access
> (like JSTOR) on the menus but we're considering whether to take all
> full-text resources off the menus and provide them only through the
> catalog. On the other hand, we have a number of subject-based guides which
> list individual E-journal (and other) titles. It is up to the author of
> each subject guide to decide what to include.
> 
> This is not only a question of navigatibility and presentation to users;
> there is also the issue of the duplication of effort required to create and
> maintain both catalog and menu (we do use a database) records for each
> title.
> 
> >In addition to subscriptions, we also want to point our users toward
> >"free" resources on the Web. Do we mix these in with our "on-campus
> >only" subscriptions?
> 
> Though I've seen this distinction made, it really baffles me. If a resource
> is of high enough quality for us to want to offer it to our users, it
> shouldn't matter (from a menuing perspective) whether we've paid for it or
> not. The same goes for "Internet" versus "local" resources. It's nice to go
> to one spot to find resources of a particular type or subject area, and not
> to have to check the "free" menu *and* the "paid-for" menu. On the other
> hand, you may want to have an area for peripheral (usually free) resources
> that would not be considered part of the "core" (usually expensive)
> resource collection. It's entirely appropriate to put these in a separate
> area, but the distinction should be made on the basis of their potential
> use for patrons, not on whether they cost the library money.
> 
> PG
> _______________________________
> Peter C. Gorman
> University of Wisconsin
> General Library System
> Automation Services
> pcgorman at facstaff.wisc.edu
> (608) 265-5291
> 
>