The Good, the Bad, and Ugly Sides
of Electronic Journals
by Ed Sadowski
Reference and Instruction Librarian
Weber Center For Learning Resources
Arapahoe Community College
Electronic journals are a boon to the world of academia. Yes, e-journals are a primary force in the information explosion, and simultaneously a primary tool in managing the information overload of our times. But this relatively new form of scholarly communication comes with its own downsides.
The transition from exclusively print to a hybrid world of scholarship that is increasingly electronic is blurring the distinction between the two, sometimes creating difficulties and confusion in terminology. The definitions of “published,” “e-journal,” and “database” in some ways have become fuzzier than ever.
With their often obvious virtues, e-journals come with disadvantages that publishers, academicians and libraries are learning to deal with, resulting in the reshaping of this growing and changing medium of scholarly information to maximize access and usability.
Print vs. electronic availability of journals
Increasingly print journals are available in electronic versions, although not all journals have made the transition from analog to digital. On the other hand, some journals, because of cost factors, have eliminated the print version and only publish in electronic format. Some new journals have published only in electronic format.
Subscription and open access journals
The tools of choice for accessing electronic journals are library subscription periodical databases, such as ProQuest and EBSCOhost. (ACC Library databases are at www.arapahoe.edu/lrc/databases.html). These databases have varied degrees of content of journals in electronic form due to publisher restrictions and licensing agreements. While for the most part the entire (“full text”) article is available in the databases, some articles are only listed with citations or abstracts. Databases, then, function as a combination periodical index and actual repository of articles.
E-journals may also be available to subscribers on the publications’ Web sites. The free access movement, whose mission is to make journals freely available to all, is seeing an increased availability of electronic journals on the Web. (Free electronic journals links are at www.knowledgeresearch.net/ElectronicJournals.html.) Journals available in commercial databases are easier to access, with a single search across many publications, as well as with use of federated searching. Journals not found in databases, dispersed across many Web sites, are not as easily searched, requiring more separate searches within Web sites and across various Web sites.
Print vs. electronic impact on use by researchers
It’s been found that researchers use print and electronic journals differently, with different preferences under different research situations. A study concluded that users consider electronic resources easier to access and research than print resources. Faculty tend to prefer print more, while students prefer electronic publications. Electronic journals were preferred for printing out copies and checking references. For pure reading and scanning, print journals are preferred, especially because of the higher visual quality of text and graphics.
Peer-reviewed journals
The best commercial databases, such as ProQuest and EBSCOhost, allow the user to select peer-reviewed/refereed journals in literature searches. The Directory of Online Access Journals (www.doaj.org) exclusively carries free peer-reviewed journals, stating “the journal must exercise peer-review or editorial quality control to be included.” But other freely-available scholarly articles on the Web do not pass through such a filter: “preprint” articles archived on the Web, or self-published articles on the Web, do not qualify as peer-reviewed. Papers submitted at conferences may not be peer-reviewed.
The downside of e-journals
The advantages of e-journals are obvious: the convenience of 24/7 access from any location outside of the formerly restrictive physical space of libraries. No more having to mess with print materials, microforms, photocopiers. Libraries save storage, display space and save on subscription costs. And, of course, increasingly e-journals are completely free of charge, without having to be accessed through information middlemen such as vendors and libraries.
But there are the not-so-good aspects of e-journals.
Incomplete replication of the original. The electronic version of a journal is not necessarily an exact match of the print publication. Much of the e-journal content is only the HTML text version, not the exact reproduction of the original. That means, unless the article was scanned in its original form or saved as a PDF, the article graphs, charts, photos, illustrations are not available. Sometimes the graphics are excluded for copyright reasons. Some e-journals don’t include letters to the editor or advertisements. If these additional elements are important, the analog (hard-copy) version of the document has to be found. On the other hand, some electronic journals may have new or additional material not included in the original print version.
Incomplete retrospective coverage. The strength of the online world is the plethora of current publishing content that is available. The weakness of online access is that much of the older published works have not been digitized, and are only accessible the old-fashioned way. True, increasingly older issues of publications are becoming available online and the retrospective gap is being narrowed. But the high cost of such conversions hinders a complete digitization of older materials.
License-based restrictions. Publishers of e-journals guard use of their publications just as they do with print materials. Licensing agreements between publishers and libraries spell out authorized users, usually enrolled students, faculty, staff, and walk-in users. Some e-journals are not available to licensed users until after a lag time of a month or year after publication, with the most current issues in full text being accessible only in the print form. Even free open-access journals may have this delayed release period of the electronic version.
Instability of access points. Short of flood, fire, theft and the crumbly disintegration of paper, the print copies of journals can last forever in a library’s collection. Now digital collections ostensibly don’t have to worry about such physical vulnerabilities. But electronic journals have their own vulnerabilities. Digital content per se is unstable in that it can be easily altered, corrupted and even lost.
E-journals do not necessarily become archived or end up with a permanent home. What if a library’s subscription to a certain database ceases? Unless the same journal is included in another current database, the library’s direct access to that journal also ceases, requiring other ways to be found to access it. What if a journal ceases publication, or a publisher goes out of business, or replacement back issues are no longer made available? Is there any guarantee the journal will remain available somehow after its demise?
Web-based, non-database-held articles are particularly vulnerable. Being part of a commercial periodical database adds a certain amount of stability to a journal. Outside of this protective cocoon, in the unpredictable Wild, Wild Web, life is not so certain. Did you know that, according to the Library of Congress, the average life span of a Web site is 44 to 75 days? Increasingly authors cite articles published on Web pages which not infrequently disappear. The journal Science reports a study found that 13 percent of Internet references in scholarly articles were inactive after only 27 months. Such a state of electronic journal instability can be interpreted as a crisis of sorts, a cause for concern.
The digital archiving movement
Started in the 1990s, efforts by various groups gives us hope that electronic content will now have permanent homes on the Web. Founded in 1996, Archive.org, and its Archive-It.org offshoot, was the first notable initiative, with the mind-boggling ambition to preserve anything and everything digital forever, which would include all the content on Web sites and even the Web sites themselves. Other organizations subsequently jumped on the bandwagon with their own initiatives.
Academic libraries have taken a key proactive role to focus specifically on e-journals, thanks to the financial support of the Mellon Foundation, JSTOR, the National Science Foundation, the Library of Congress, Ithaka, Sun Microsystems Inc., journal publishers, and others. The first such large-scale academic-based initiative was the Stanford University Libraries’ LOCKSS (Lots of Copies Keeps Stuff Safe) in 1998. Using the print archiving model of redundancy, LOCKSS has enrolled dozens of libraries worldwide to keep multiple copies of e-journal content using open-source software. A centralized archiving service, Portico, was launched in 2002, using the participation of publishers and libraries, assuring a single location, with backup copies, for important e-content.
The reference linking solution: CrossRef and WebCite
More specifically, as part of the archiving movement, something has been done to provide permanence and the strong anchor needed for Web citations—a way to establish persistent links. These new systems can be actively used by publishers, editors, writers, bloggers, Web page producers, archivists, and libraries (in library databases and catalogs). URLs are now capable of being permanently archived and accessible. As the system becomes universally accepted and used, the pesky “404 File Not Found” promises to be less and less of an occurrence. While the CrossRef system requires a publisher fee to participate, WebCite is a free service to everyone.
Publishers have banded together and formed CrossRef (www.CrossRef.org), a not-for-profit organization. The collaborative CrossRef mission has, in its own words, a “mandate to make reference linking throughout online scholarly literature efficient and reliable” with “an infrastructure for linking citations across publishers.” CrossRef is “to serve as the complete citation linking backbone for all scholarly literature online, as a means of lowering barriers to content discovery and access for the researcher.” Publishers participate by registering with CrossRef. The CrossRef system aims to include not just electronic journal content, but also conference proceedings and books.
These goals are to be accomplished through the use of the Digital Object Identifier (DOI), fully explained at the International DOI Foundation site, www.doi.org. The DOI system attaches a permanent alphanumeric string to a digital object to facilitate storage and retrieval of these digital objects. Examples of digital objects are journal articles and book chapters. In the CrossRef system, each DOI is associated with a set of basic metadata and a URL pointer to the full text, so that it uniquely identifies the content item and provides a persistent link to its location on the Internet. Each publisher who registers is assigned a DOI prefix number. Each document item submitted by a publisher is also assigned a unique DOI number following the prefix, tagged to the article’s metadata and URL.
WebCite is a free service that allows authors to register their Web material and, in effect, archive it. (Instructions to authors are at www.WebCite.org.) WebCite is likewise useful for all Web publishers, editors, and libraries for archiving Web material. Readers benefit from WebCite in the event the original URL of the document is no longer working. The reader simply clicks the WebCite link, which then retrieves the document archived somewhere on the Web. Searching a WebCite database also displays what a URL looked like at or near the WebCite cited date.
Conclusion
All in all, electronic journals, as the new kid on the block, have some more growing up to do, and in need of wider acceptance from the academic and publishing communities at large. Electronic journals are more than a new fad, more than a new technological curiosity. E-journals represent a new medium that is dramatically and permanently changing the landscape of scholarly communication. E-journals are a logical extension of the Internet revolution, the latest chapter in the story of scholarship and publishing since the civilization-changing advent of the Gutenberg printing press. Despite the bumps in the road, it’s obvious that academic journals have evolved a long way, benefiting us all.
