Net notes: Directories of Electronic Journals

The day I found out that there was a journal called Hamlet Studies was the day I realised that the publish or perish imperative had gone too far. There are too many journals but, rather than lament the death of yet another forest to produce or print articles from increasingly esoteric journals and the impossibility of keeping up with the literature, it is more productive to use directories of electronic journals to identify the good quality journals of relevance to you. There are a number of directories available, some focusing only on scholarly journals and some with a much wider focus. A few of these directories are described below:

Australian Journals Online: The National Library's Database of Australian Electronic Journals
http://www.nla.gov.au/ajol/
The name says it all.

Directory of Open Access Journals
http://www.doaj.org/
This currently covers 766 journals which meet the selection criteria of being full-text, open access scholarly journals. The clear interface makes it easy to search by title or subject.

Scholarly Journals Distributed Via the World Wide Web
http://www.onlineuniversity.net/resources/directory-of-scholarly-journals/
This has similar criteria to the Directory of Open Access Journals but does not have as many titles and has not been recently updated. It is part of the University of Houston Libraries website.

Electronic Journal Miner
This has a rather bilious looking colour scheme, approximately 8000 titles, and is very broad in its coverage, with everything from the abdomen (Abdominal Imaging) to zooplankton (Journal of Plankton Research) regardless of whether it is free or fee.

NewJour (New Journal and Newsletter Announcement List for new serials on the Internet)
http://gort.ucsd.edu/newjour/
NewJour lists over 13 000 items, and serves as a means of announcing new electronic journals and newly established electronic versions of paper journals. It has a large quantity of data but there are a couple of caveats: it has been running for around a decade so some of the entries are out of date, and there is no subject index.

PubMed Central
http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/
PubMed Central offers an archive of life science journals in full text. The archive does not go back further than the 1990s for most of the journals covered but does offer all issues of the Bulletin of the Medical Library Association from 1911 onwards.

Electronic Journals Library
http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en
One of the more substantial directories available, this covers over 18 000 journals and uses traffic light colours to clearly indicate which ones offer full text and which ones are subscriber only. As the url indicates, it is a German website maintained by the University of Regensburg, but has an English version and mainly covers English language journals.

C T Peters

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