Electronic Journals: A Selected Resource Guide
(archival resource, no longer maintained)
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Electronic Journal Providers
http://www.library.ucsb.edu/istl/00-summer/article2.html
Huber, Charles F. "Electronic Journal Publishers: A Reference Librarian's Guide." Issues in Science and Technology Librarianship, Summer 2000. An excellent summary of the major players in e-journal publication; including sections on large publishers, small and medium publishers, aggregators and specialty aggregators; organized in table form, with considerable critical analysis.
Definitions, and a quick history of e-journals
What is an electronic journal? When did they turn up? The only thing that can be said definitively is that e-journals are serial publications available in digital format. Some are distributed on CD-ROMs, some over the internet. Of the internet-available ones, some are delivered over the World Wide Web, some by e-mail. Some are ASCII text, some are HTML WWW pages, some use proprietary formats such as Adobe's PDF (portable document format). Some have paper equivalents, some are purely electronic. Some are published in electronic form, some are digitally reformatted print journals. Some are free, some are available by subscription only. Some are peer-reviewed scholarly journals; many are not quality-controlled.
The salient features of electronic publications are:
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they can be delivered to the desktop (although the desktop needs a computer!) |
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they can be read by more than one person at a time. |
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the text can be searched. |
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they can include multimedia and graphics, in color, at marginal cost. |
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they can be published more quickly than paper publications. |
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they can be interactive; that is, they can foster an online exchange of ideas by e-mail. |
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if they are on the WWW, they can take advantage of the ability to make hyperlinks, both internally and to other publications. This means that readers can link directly to references cited in an article and also, with additional effort on the part of publishers and indexers, to later articles that cite the article they are reading. |
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articles can be retrieved directly through links from abstracting and indexing databases. |
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the content can be reproduced, forwarded, modified, leading to possible problems with copyright protection and preserving authenticity. |
The main disadvantage is that, unless they are also printed on paper, they require specialized equipment for reading.
The earliest e-journals were distributed on CD-ROM or diskette, during the 1970's, and were largely used in the library. The early efforts at networked distribution predated the World Wide Web.
Some milestones include:
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1987 - New Horizons in Adult Education, the first peer-reviewed journal distributed on the Internet, made its debut, published bye the Syracuse University Kellogg Project. It was ASCII text, free and distributed via a BITNET list server, with printed copies mailed to those who had no free access to BITNET. |
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1990 - Postmodern Culture, another peer-reviewed journal distributed on the Internet, appeared initially as ASCII text available by e-mail or diskette and is still published on the WWW by Project Muse. |
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1992 - The first peer-reviewed, electronic, full-text e-journal including graphics was OJCCT (Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials), a very early effort by OCLC to support a networked, refereed, electronic-only (no paper) journal, with full text and graphics, available by subscription. It was ahead of its time; requiring specialized viewing software, since the WWW didn't exist yet. This grew into OCLC's Electronic Journals Online (EJO) project, which eventually did adopt the WWW as a distribution mechanism, and now it's known as Electronic Collections Online (ECO). OJCCT broke new ground in other ways: the articles were set up as a searchable database, using the Z39.50 protocol. It had a graphical user interface, not just ASCII text. |
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1991-1995 - Commercial publishers' involvement became evident with the TULIP project, an effort by Elsevier, in collaboration with several academic institutions, to distribute electronically journals that were already available in print form. The data was distributed to the individual campuses, who mounted the data locally for their own use. |
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1993 - JSTOR (Journal Storage Project) got underway as the first major retrospective electronic archiving project of printed journals. |
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1993 - Gophers became ubiquitous and changed everybody's idea of how publications should be delivered. |
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1993 - Gophers were quickly replaced by the WWW, which gained a strong foothold in academia in 1994, and now we assume that e-journals will be delivered via the WWW. |
For further reading about some of these projects:
http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v2/n1/amiran.2n1
Amiran, Eyal, and John Unsworth. "Postmodern Culture: Publishing in the Electronic Medium." The Public-Access Computer Systems Review 2, No. 1 (1991): 67-76.
http://info.lib.uh.edu/pr/v3/n2/hickey.3n2
Hickey, Thomas B., and Terry Noreault. "The Development of a Graphical User Interface for The Online Journal of Current Clinical Trials. The Public-Access Computer Systems Review Vol. 3, No. 2 (1992): 4-12.
http://www.elsevier.com/homepage/about/resproj/trmenu.htm
TULIP final report: July, 1996.
http://www.dlib.org/dlib/july97/07guthrie.html
Guthrie, Kevin M. "JSTOR: From Project to Independent Organization." D-Lib Magazine, July/August 1997.
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