Electronic Dissertations Library

Exploring the development of the independent, electronic, scholarly journal, by Alison Wells

Abstract

This dissertation sets out to examine the extent of independent, electronic scholarly journals, that is, those that are available through the Internet, usually the World Wide Web, free of charge to the reader, and publish academic articles, usually peer reviewed. A list of journals was drawn up using the NewJour archive of journal announcements, supplemented by the World Wide Web Virtual Library and Glasgow University library catalogue. The 387 journals that were found were then categorised in the following categories: Title, URL, originating country, whether it was peer reviewed, organisation or person responsible, broad subject, narrow subject, format, language, whether there was a print version, year of first issue, year of latest issue and number of issues and articles per year.

An e-mail survey was also carried out of the 84 electronic journals that had some way of determining their readership, either by having voluntary or compulsory registration, or sending e-mail updates to subscribers. The survey asked for the number of subscribers to each journal, and also the number of hits the Web site received each month.

It was found that most of the journals were following one of three strategies:

• a Niche Market strategy - focusing a highly specialised journal to a small audience.
• a Vanity Publishing strategy - producing journals in a mainstream area, with no external funding.
• a Commercial strategy - producing journals in a mainstream area, with attempts made to gain external funding through sponsorship and advertising.

It was concluded that unless the current market for electronic journals changed in some way, either by journal budgets devolving to academic departments, or some collaborative action between universities, that the future for electronic journals was as part of "one-stop shops" for particular subjects, with a mixture of free and paid for journals (or article servers), together with other related services, controlled by commercial outfits.

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