Information Technology Reference
In-Depth Information
the British Library, which will hold journals no longer required by
higher education libraries, retain them permanently and make them
available to researchers.
3
Library space is an important issue, which is under scrutiny in many
academic institutions. Storage space for printed topics and journals is
expensive, and more and more space is required year on year. Some
institutions see the opportunity for returning freed-up space to lecture
rooms and laboratories, others have decided to retain it within the library
and create more social, exploratory and group learning space - for
example, the Learning Grid at Warwick University (Edwards, 2006).
As libraries continue to remove bound back-volumes of journals from
their stacks, what of the current issues of journals that now are
predominantly available as e-journals? Will the current system of
journal publishing survive? Journals themselves are merely the
wrappers for articles, and as publishers increasingly encourage users to
access their titles from their own platforms, surely these are looking
more and more like databases of articles. The fact that the article
metadata is also being released to search engines so that they can be
discovered more easily also means that the unit of transaction is
becoming the article - not the journal. Publishers, journals editors and
possibly some academics would argue that it is the journal title which
provides the prestige of a publication.
For decades academia has been obsessed with methods of calculating
the quality of journals such as citation rankings and impact factors.
These methodologies provide the basis for measuring the research
excellence of academic institutions in many countries. If we were to
move away from the concept of the journal as the package, how would
quality be measured? This issue is already being addressed by the Public
Library of Science (PLoS). It is devising an article-level metric for its
journals, based predominantly on usage (Binfield, 2009).
However, many publishers are moving into the Web 2.0 space, and
more and more journals are providing RSS feeds, blogs and wikis - and
even links to background research data - for their authors and readers.
Is this a last-ditch attempt to create reader loyalty to the title? Or is it
that the journal really is an efficient way of disseminating peer-reviewed
information and data? Ian Russell in Chapter 3 clearly thinks it is. Rick
Anderson in Chapter 2 is not so sure.
But one thing is certain: the scholarly journal industry has evolved
