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Electronic Journals: A Selected Resource Guide

(archival resource, no longer maintained)

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E-, pre-, and free print servers

Online pre-print servers, also called "e-print servers," are sites where researchers can make their projects and results freely available before the process of peer review and official publication have taken place. Technically, "pre-print" is a misnomer, since there is no assurance that an article on one of these servers will ever be printed on paper, and many of them will remain on the server after they are published in print. They are perhaps better called "self-archives", a name that is starting to catch on, because they are places where authors can deposit their own work. This idea of pre-prints has been around for a long time in the world of physics, and the Los Alamos National Laboratory's online pre-print server (http://www.arxiv.org/) has led the pack with electronic pre-prints. Scientists have access to the findings of others before they have been published, and researchers have the benefit of feedback from readers of the pre-prints.

In October 1999 the founders of the Los Alamos National Laboratory online pre-print server hosted a meeting to explore cooperation among scholarly e-print archives. This led to the establishment of the Open Archives Initiative, whose goal is to contribute to the transformation of scholarly communication by defining the technical and organizational framework for open scholarly publication. The framework is called the Santa Fe Convention.

Preprint servers in general

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/01-winter/article3.html

Luce, Richard E. "E-prints Intersect the Digital Library: Inside the Los Alamos arXiv ." Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, No. 29 (Winter, 2001). Focusing on the Los Alamos Archive, this paper also covers pre-print servers in general.

http://www.infotoday.com/searcher/oct00/tomaiuolo&packer.htm

Tomaiuolo, Nicholas G. and Joan G. Packer. "Preprint Servers: Pushing the Envelope of Electronic Scholarly Publishing." Searcher, Vol. 8, No. 9 (October, 2000). A good overview, with pointers to popular preprint servers in various fields.

http://www.nature.com/nature/debates/e-access/

"Future e-access to the primary literature." An ongoing forum, sponsored by Nature, on the issues surrounding the future of scholarly scientific publishing, which largely involves electronic preprint servers.

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/december99/12harnad.html

Harnad, Stevan. "Free at Last: The Future of Peer-Reviewed Journals." D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 5, No. 12 (December, 1999). This opinion piece defends the self-archive movement.

http://www.osti.gov/preprint/index.html

PrePrint Network, "a searchable gateway to preprint servers that deal with scientific and technical disciplines of concern to DOE," supported by Department of Energy's Office of Scientific and Technical Information. http://www.osti.gov/preprint/ppnbrowse.html contains links to a very large number of pre-print servers.

Open Archives Initiative

http://www.dlib.org/dlib/february00/vandesompel-oai/02vandesompel-oai.html

Van de Sompel, Herbert, and Carl Lagoze. "The Santa Fe Convention of the Open Archives Initiative." D-Lib Magazine, Vol. 6, No. 2 (February, 2000). A summary of the results of the October 1999 meeting which established the Open Archives initiative.

http://www.openarchives.org/

Website of the Open Archives Initiative.

PubMed Central

http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/about/intro.html

On May 5, 1999, Harold Varmus, then Director of the National Institutes of Health, proposed E-BIOMED, a national electronic preprint server for the biomedical sciences. The project has since been renamed PubMed Central. "PubMed Central is a digital archive of life sciences journal literature managed by the National Center for Biotechnology Information (NCBI) at the U.S. National Library of Medicine (NLM). It is not a journal publisher. Access to PubMed Central (PMC) is free and unrestricted."

http://www.press.umich.edu/jep/05-03/turner0503.html

Turner, Judith Axler. "PubMed Central: A good Idea." The Journal of Electronic Publishing, Vol. 5, Issue 3 (March, 2000). A brief summary of the PubMed Central and its strengths.

Other preprint servers in various fields, a sample

http://clinmed.netprints.org/home.dtl

NetPrints: Clinical Medicine and Health Research. Launched in December, 1999, this is a collaborative effort between BMJ and HighWire Press. The philosophy underlying the site is explained in the BMJ editorial http://www.bmj.com/cgi/content/full/319/7224/1515 (Delamoth, Tony, and Richard Smith. "Netprints: the Next Phase in the Evolution of biomedical publishing." BMJ, 319: 1515-1516 [11 December, 1999]).

http://www.ncstrl.org

Networked Computer Science Technical Reference Library.

http://cogprints.soton.ac.uk/

CogPrints, the "e-print archive" for cognitive sciences.

Scholarly communities

Several "Internet communities" have grown up that include pre-print servers. These are also also known as "knowledge environments" and include multiple resources for a specific subject discipline, such as electronic journals, alerting services, news, discussion groups, integration with digital libraries, and support tools for peer review and self-publishing.

http://cognet.mit.edu/- MIT CogNet, an electronic community for the cognitive and brain sciences. Access is by subscription.

http://escholarship.cdlib.org/
http://escholarship.cdlib.org/about.html - California Digital Library's Electronic Scholarship program.

http://www.earthscape.org/ - Columbia Earthscape contains current research, news, policy debates and curriculum models in the earth sciences. Access is by subscription.

Free e-journals

There are some movements advocating the provision of e-journals at no cost, either to developing nations for humanitarian reasons, or simply to facilitate scholarly communication.

http://www.who.int/inf-pr-2001/en/pr2001-32.html

Press release from the World Health Organization announcing a program to provide access to biomedical journals to developing nations, in cooperation with six major publishers.

http://www.publiclibraryofscience.org/

Public Library of Science, "a non-profit organization of scientists committed to making the world's scientific and medical literature freely accessible to scientists and to the public around the world, for the benefit of scientific progress, education and the public good."

http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/00-summer/refereed.html

Fosmire, Michael. "Free Scholarly Electronic Journals: How Good Are They?" Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, No. 27 (Summer, 2000). Assesses the impact of free electronic journals on scholarly research.

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