EduBlog Insights

I’ve posted my frustrations about publishing research and the difficulty of access by all before, so this study really piqued my interest. It may yours as well so I thought I’d share.

This study, LIS Open Access E=Journal - where are you?, in Webology examines how the landscape of online journals has changed. It explores:

whether the journals are known
if their content is easy to find
if they have gained acceptance in directories, indexes, and abstracting tools
the extent to which they have established their reputation

The criteria to include the journals in the study included:

being free
published in 2000 or later
the frequency of publication included any frequency up to and including those published annually

Journals were excluded that:

were currently available in print
English was not the primary language
no publication in the last 2 years
required subscription or membership

The article provides links to the various directories.

After checking the accuracy of the author’s established selection and exclusion criteria they were checked against information provided in standard bibliographic sources. They also checked in abstracting and indexing sources. You will find those links in the article, too.

They came up with a final list of 31 e-journal titles and all those links are provided, as well.

Google Scholar was noted as the search engine of choice and had the advantage of being free as opposed to expensive subscription based databases. Other resources to keep in mind are DOAJ, World Cat, and EBSCO.s LISTA. World Cat was mentioned as the source to go to to verify bibliographic information about a LIS e-journal. It had 100% coverage of all 31 titles and that made it stand out in relation to other examined source.

I’ve been spending some time browsing through these journals and they are good reads. I’ll try to post some links to noteworthy articles in my next post.

This entry was posted on Friday, March 13th, 2009 at 2:59 pm and is filed under Research, open access. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.