The Transition from Print to Electronic Journals: A Study of College and University Libraries in Indiana :

« Objectives: This study examines what factors are considered by college and university libraries in Indiana when making the decision to cancel subscriptions to print journals when an electronic equivalent is available. The study also looks at who the primary decision makers are in this regard. Libraries at public and private institutions of varying sizes were included in the study.

Methods : An online survey was sent to seventy-three libraries in the consortium, Academic Libraries of Indiana. Structured interviews with administrators at nine libraries were also conducted.

Results: Academic libraries in Indiana use subscription cost, redundancy of formats, student preference, budget reductions and usage as the primary factors in canceling print journal subscriptions in favor of their electronic counterparts. There is also a preference for the electronic format for new subscriptions even when a print version is also available.

Conclusions: The study indicates that subscription cost is the most important consideration in the journal cancelation process with other factors also having an effect on the preference of libraries for electronic versions of journals. The study also shows that libraries at public and private colleges and universities are at different stages of moving away from print to an online-only journal format. At the same time, there is consensus that a small collection of print titles will still be needed. The primary decision-makers are librarians, faculty, and library administrators. »

URL : http://ejournals.library.ualberta.ca/index.php/EBLIP/article/view/10330

The impact of open access journals on library and information scientists’ research in Taiwan :

« As some library and information science (LIS) journals in Taiwan are open access, the aim of the study is to investigate what, if any, impact open access journals have on library and information science scholars‘ research in Taiwan. Therefore, the objectives of the study is to explore the scholarly productivity of LIS scholars in Taiwan, to find out what articles they publish and OA articles as a percentage of all titles, and to calculate the mean citation rate of open access articles and articles not freely available online. A bibliometric method was used in the study. To determine whether a difference in research impact existed, two research impact indicators were used, that is, open access articles as a percentage of all published titles and mean citation rate of open access articles and those not freely available online. Data on published articles with citation counts by the LIS scholars in Taiwan from 2000 to 2009 was collected from the ACI Database and Social Science Citation Index Database. The study shows that for 72 LIS scholars who were subjects of the investigation, 64 of them had published 745 articles within the previous ten years: 679 articles in Chinese and 66 articles in English; 499 of these were OA articles, and 264 were non-OA articles; OA articles constituted 66.98% of the total number of academic articles. The mean citation rate of OA versus non-OA article citation was 1.29.Analysis of impact indicators shows that open access journals have an impact on the research of LIS scholars in Taiwan, in particular, LIS OA journals have more research impact in Chinese than those in English. »

URL : http://eprints.ptar.uitm.edu.my/3624/

Measuring the Quality of Electronic Journals :

« This paper presents the methodology developed to create a system to evaluate academic electronic journals. This methodology was developed in two stages. In the first stage, a system to evaluate electronic journals was created. The criteria framework and the indicators for assessment for academic electronic journals were selected and defined. According to this framework, several questions were designed to measure each indicator and, as a result, an instrument to evaluate academic electronic journals was built. In the second stage, this instrument was validated by 16 editors of electronic journals of different countries and different areas of knowledge that were considered as judges to evaluate clarity, importance, relevance and coverage of each question, indicator and criteria. This instrument was distributed by e‑mail. The opinions given by the judges were processed and then used to help in the construction of a new instrument that is ready to be presented to the Mexican Council of Scientific Research in order to evaluate Mexican academic electronic journals. »

URL : http://eprints.rclis.org/handle/10760/15699