[WEB4LIB] Ejournal URL stability

[Eric Hellman]

There is a great deal of variety in the e-journal world, and there is 
certainly more movement of URL's than there should be. URL's may 
shift when a publisher is acquired, or when a publisher loses rights 
to a title owned by someone else, (a scholarly society, for example), 
or when a publisher outsources its on-line hosting. Many smaller 
publishers started out putting content on-line in a less than 
methodical way, and then decide to redo a site completely. 
Maintaining the old URL's can cost a bit of money, so they are often 
discarded (and hopefully not replaced by porn sites!)

There are also growing islands of stability. For example, the 
American Physical Society has committed to stable URL's for all the 
journal articles it has published, going back into the 1800's!

A large group of publishers has established a persistent naming and 
resolution service for online journal articles. This service, called 
CrossRef (http://www.crossref.org), now covers 4,969 titles from over 
70 publishers. Libraries can become affiliate members of CrossRef for 
$500 per year and can get look-up access to CrossRef for millions of 
journal-article URL's. As the first software company to be accepted 
as a CrossRef Affiliate, we have just begun to offer for sale a 
client agent that lets you use CrossRef on your library's website or 
catalog, see http://www.openly.com/1cate/1cate4cr.pdf

>Recently a representative from one of the (relatively new) online journal
>management companies gave a presentation in our library.  One of the first
>things he said was something to the effect that web addresses of online
>journals are constantly changing, which he undoubtedly thought would be a
>selling point for his service.  I asked him if he had any data to support
>his statement.  He didn't.  I then went on to explain that, at least with
>the online journal vendors I have experience with, the URLs seem to be
>rather stable.

Most of the flux in the URL's that you would want to list on your 
website comes from aggregators adding and dropping titles from month 
to month. Which is why we're putting monthly title refresh into our 
1Cate software.

>
>I would be interested to know the thoughts and experiences of others
>regarding the stability of online journal URLs.  It seems to me that any
>ejournal vendor that was constantly changing URLs to journal titles would
>not be doing a very good business.  What have others experienced with
>e-journal URLs?  Is the question of URL stability different in other
>disciplines (we are a medical library)?

In biomedicine, PubMed does exert a stabilizing influence on URL's by 
putting links to a publisher's site along with an indexed abstract.

>Robert J. Vander Hart
>The Lamar Soutter Library
>University of Massachusetts Medical School
>55 Lake Avenue N
>Worcester  MA  01655


-- 
Eric Hellman
Openly Informatics, Inc.
http://www.openly.com/1cate/      1 Click Access To Everything
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