Free Scholarly Electronic Journals: How Good Are They?
DOI:
https://doi.org/10.29173/istl1808Abstract
Amidst the furor of serials price increases, there is a steadily growing segment of the serials landscape with prices that can't be beat, that is to say, free. Many scholarly journals are freely available in electronic format (no subscription fee or membership required), but there has been little assessment of their impact on scholarly research. A fairly comprehensive list of free scholarly electronic journals in the science, technology, and medical fields was compiled and was examined using citation analyses. The results indicate that, unlike the situation five years ago (Harter 1998), there are several free scholarly electronic journals that have a significant impact on their respective fields.
Downloads
References
Brooks, T. A. 1986. "Evidence of complex citer motivations." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 37(1):34-36.
Fosmire and Young. In press. "Free scholarly electronic journals: what access do college and university libraries provide?" College & Research Libraries.
Gilbert, G. N. 1977. "Referencing as persuasion." Social Studies of Science. 7:113-122.
Harter, Stephen P. 1998. "Scholarly communication and electronic journals: an impact study." Journal of the American Society for Information Science, 49.6 (1998): 507-516.
Harter, Stephen P. and Kim, Hak Joon. 1996a. "Electronic journals and scholarly communication: a citation and reference study." Proceedings of the Midyear Meeting of the American Society for Information Science, San Diego, CA, May 20-22, 1996: 299-315. [Online]. Available {http://php.indiana.edu/~harter/harter-asis96midyear.html}. [August 8, 2000].
Harter, Stephen P. and Kim, Hak Joon. . 1996b. "Accessing electronic journals and other e-publications: an empirical study." College and Research Libraries 57 (September 1996): 440-456.
Harter, Stephen P. and Nisonger, Thomas E. 1997. "ISI's impact factor as misnomer: a proposed new measure to assess journal impact." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 48(12):1146-1148.
Hitchcock, Steve, Carr, Leslie, and Hall, Wendy. 1996. A Survey of STM Online Journals 1990-95: The Calm Before the Storm. [Online] Available: http://journals.ecs.soton.ac.uk/survey/survey.html#scope [August 8, 2000].
O'Connell, Heath. 2000. Most Cited High-Energy Physics Articles 1999 Edition. [Online] Available: http://www.slac.stanford.edu/library/topcites/top40.1999.html. [August 8, 2000]. Moed, H. F. and Van Leeuwen, Th. N. 1995. "Improving accuracy of Institute for Scientific Information's journal impact factors." Journal of the American Society for Information Science 46(6): 461-467.
Mogge, Dru W., Ed. 1997. Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters and Academic Discussion Lists Foreword. [Online]. Available: {http://www.eric.ed.gov/ERICWebPortal/custom/portlets/recordDetails/detailmini.jsp?_nfpb=true&_&ERICExtSearch_SearchValue_0=ED398931&ERICExtSearch_SearchType_0=no&accno=ED398931}. [August 8, 2000].
Nisonger, Thomas E. 1994. "A methodological issue concerning the use of Social Sciences Citation Index Journal Citation Reports impact factor data for journal ranking." Library Acquisitions: Practice and Theory, 18(4): 447-458.
Roes, Hans. 1994. "Electronic journals: a survey of the literature and the net." Journal of Information Networking 2.3: 169-186. [Online]. Available: {http://cwis.kub.nl/~dbi/users/roes/articles/ej_join.htm} [August 8, 2000].
Small, Henry G. 1978. "Cited documents as concept symbols." Social Studies of Science 8: 327-340.
Downloads
Published
How to Cite
Issue
Section
License
Copyright (c) 2000 Michael Fosmire, Song Yu
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License.