Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
show that scholars view the individual subscription price of printed journals to be too
high
[50]
. The economics of e-journals is discussed in more details in Section
5
.
Some of the challenges discussed in this section were resolved with the introduc-
tion of electronic journals, particularly hybrid journals (e.g., access, format, cycle
time). Other issues (e.g., ability to publish, innovation versus control) are more com-
plex and require fundamental changes in academic views and culture.
4.
Electronic Academic Journals
In this section, we describe the first decade of electronic publishing and define the
various types of academic electronic journals in existence.
The use of computer networks to disseminate information was studied at least
since the 1970s. King and Roderer
[26]
published several articles in 1978 on elec-
tronic publishing. At the New Jersey Institute of Technology Turoff
[55]
and later
Turoff and Hiltz
[56]
described electronic publishing using the Electronic Infor-
mation and Education Services (
EIES)
, an early electronic mail and conferencing
system, modified to accommodate electronic publishing. Most early attempts to pub-
lish electronically through communication networks, magnetic media (tape or CDs)
or shared databases failed. Although research universities were connected to some
form of a communications network since the 1970s, early forms of the Internet (such
as ARPANET) were limited in their media capabilities, search facilities, and band-
width.
By the end of the 1980s a few electronic journals started appearing. In July 1991,
for example, the
Directory of Electronic Journals
,
Newsletters and Academic Dis-
cussion Lists
[31]
published by the Association of Research Libraries (ARL) listed
27 electronic journals. The growth in the first half of the 1990s was explosive.
The same directory listed 1093 electronic journals in May 1996
[32]
.TheARL
stopped tracking electronic journals in 1997. E-journals were no longer a novelty.
As we discuss later in this section, not only did the number of e-journals increase,
so did the forms that electronic journals took. Several sites list e-journals such as
http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/toc.html
,
which is maintained by the University of Cal-
ifornia San Diego (UCSD). In 1999, this site listed approximately 6,000 serials. In
May 2005, the number grew to 15,920.
4 . 1
C l a s s i fi c a t i o n o f E l e c t r o n i c J o u r n a l s
Despite the growth in the numbers of listed e-journals, a standard for defining an
e-journal does not exist.
