Kathleen E. Joswick, Electronic Full-Text Journal Articles: Convenience or Compromise, T.H.E. Journal, May 2005. Excerpt: '[O]nly prestigious journals are included in standard indexes. Inclusion in an electronic aggregator database, in contrast, is not a sign of quality but the sign of a business contract between the journal publisher and the database provider. Users of databases are no longer reviewing only the discipline's premiere journals. On the contrary, in the race to provide access to the most journals, some databases obscure the best articles by overwhelming the user with material that is neither respected nor relevant. As a result, the responsibility to identify the most appropriate resources is shifted from the experts in the discipline to the users --often students who lack the skill to separate the acceptable from the unacceptable....Because many aggregated databases provide the article text rather than page reproduction, graphical features disappear from the articles. And articles stripped of graphs, photographs, charts, special characters, tables, or illustrations are not the same as the original versions. Even more deplorable, full-text databases do not always include every article from each issue of a journal. Cover-to-cover full-text is rarer than most vendors lead their customers to believe. Letters to the editor, book reviews, editorials, poetry, and brief articles are routinely skipped, while in some instances, so are major articles....Interestingly, comparisons of printed journals and their articles' availability in full-text databases have shown an inclusion rate as low as 60 percent....Users are often misled about the currency of the material offered in electronic databases....Many journals also embargo electronic access to their recent issues as an incentive to retain their print subscribers. It is often difficult to identify these embargoed or tardy journals from the lists provided by vendors.'
Posted by
Peter Suber at 5/31/2005 09:31:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
