Electronic journal adoption
All of the readings in our earliest surveys and many in the later surveys through the 1990s came from printed journals or from copies of print articles. The percent of reading in electronic journals was clearly going up throughout the 1990s; however, our early surveys did not specifically measure the format. Others have reported widespread adoption of electronic scholarly journals, with the amounts varying substantially by work field. With the growth of electronic distribution of journals and alternatives to traditional journals, use levels and patterns of such media may be expected to change. Several recent chapters of the Annual Review of Information Science and Technology(ARIST) provide literature reviews of developments in and use of electronic journals.2–4 Studies have found that the perception of quality of sources is an important aspect in whether or not they are used and this may be particularly important in electronic journals. Speier et al.5 asked business school faculty to rate the quality of peer-reviewed electronic journals versus paper, from those of substantially lesser quality (1) to those of substantially greater quality (7). About 61% of respondents rated electronic journal quality in the three lowest ratings (average rating of 2.9, excluding non-responses).4 Budd and Connaway6 also asked about the quality of electronic and print journals. Although most respondents (77.1%) said they could not judge, the majority of remaining respondents rated electronic journals inferior to most print journals. Some felt that electronic journals were improving, but 85% said they could not judge.3 Ease of use also affects whether or not sources will be used. Reading on a screen is a common problem for users. Richardson7 found that none of his survey respondents appeared to have read articles on the screen. Schauder8 found that 75% of respondents preferred to read printouts. Simpson9 observed similar results. The Super Journal Project in the UK10 surveyed contributors to electronic journals about their perceptions of advantages and disadvantages of publishing in electronic journals. The greatest advantages of electronic journals were found to be easy access, convenience, search capabilities, direct access and better-than-photocopy printouts; the greatest disadvantages were slow access, breadth or depth of journal coverage, reading on screen, poor graphics or presentation, and access problems. When respondents in Association of Research Libraries (ARL) institution business schools were asked to rate their awareness of electronic journals, most respondents placed themselves on the middle to lower end of the awareness scale.5 These results are partially reflected in use of electronic journals by these respondents: over 40% claim they rarely use electronic journals while another third of them say they never do. Lenares11 also reports that 54% of academics in her 1999 survey ‘did not know of respected e-journals in my field’, down from 61% in the previous year. Still, overall, awareness of electronic journals grew throughout the 1990s. In 2001, Rogers12 found that over half of the faculty and graduate student respondents to her survey use electronic journals and that acceptance of these alternative media is growing. Also in 2001, Brown13 surveyed physicists and astronomers who use the Los Alamos National Laboratory (LANL) arXiv.org service and observed that the majority (67%) of respondents use preprints or e-prints for the same reason many scientists use print journal articles (i.e. research support, current awareness and fact-finding).