From: Walter Kny <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Mon, 13 Oct 2014 13:23:53 -0500

Dear All,

I'd like to give you all some clarity about the Global eJournals
Library, which already so many librarians have contacted us to find
out more about this new service. So far it is the most complete
discovery tool to research open access journals articles worldwide in
the English language. It provides access to 7,452,325 articles from
19,021 open access journals published in over 120 countries. The
discovery engine allows for unlimited searches within search results
and numerous customizable filters including author, journal, subject,
date of publication, etc. The database covers Gold, Delayed Access and
Professional & Trade publications. Dates of publication span from 1888
until 2014. It is updated on a weekly basis.

How does Global eJournals Library compare with the other open access
discovery services out there? Well, for the start, all other services
are for free on the web; ours is not. We charge an affordable and
reasonable subscription fee. I think we are the only one that is a
paid service. But why? Because there is a certain number of Journals
that you can afford to cover without charging anything as its
harvesting is basically through an automated software. Yet, if you
want to reach out to the long tail of open access publishers who don't
publish in an standardized format and don't promote themselves well
despite having great content, then you have to do it manually. And to
do it manually we employ close to a hundred people who look for the
journals, harvest the metadata, curate it, test it, index it, and make
it discoverable from our database. Let me give you some figures:

The Directory of Open Access Journals is a free service whose coverage
at article level is 5,884 Journals. It is a great service, very
professional but with limited coverage at article level and focused on
Gold. Furthermore, since they depend on the publisher to provide them
with Metadata, if some publishers forget to send data on time, they
may miss titles. The Global eJournals Library covers 19,021 journals
at article level.

Highwire from Stanford offers for free access to 2.4 million open
access journals articles. But they cover 1,500 Journals only.

PubMed Central is another great free service for medical literature.
It offers 2,200 Journals. The Global eJournals Library offers 6,200
Journals in medical literature.

Web of Science offers 726 open access journals only.

Scopus offers 2,800 open access journals only.

More recently, a new service called paperity covers 2,153 journals only.

There is an additional complexity with open access journal literature
for which you have to have real people checking the thousands of
hidden websites out there. Many open access publishers change their
URLs and DOIs without telling anyone, so you may encounter instances
where you find a result in your search and when you click the link to
full-text it is gone. We monitor our links to correct those that are
broken at any given point in time.

So, please if you are aware of any other service that is not mentioned
here, please let me know.

How much does the Global eJournals Library subscription cost? It
depends on number of FTEs and it is quite affordable to fit any budget
regardless of how small it may be. I'm happy to provide you with a
quotation should you wish it.

If you would like to have a product demo, I'm more than happy to do as
well. And let me know if you would like to take a trial. Our website:

www.gejlibrary.com and my email is [log in to unmask]

One more point to bring up is that one of impact factor. Many
librarians ask us about impact factor on open access journals. There
are thousands of open access journals whose impact factor ranges from
low to nothing despite their content being very professional and up to
the highest standards. The reason boils down to lack of visibility in
libraries. Libraries' databases are filled with closed access
journals, and thus these are the main recipients of researchers. No
researcher has the time to go to the web and look for over 8,000
websites to find specific articles. The result is that closed access
journals enjoy disproportionately better visibility. It is time for
the universe of open access journals to get into the library and have
the same right to visibility as closed access journals. Then, you will
see a more balanced score of impact factors, but it will take time.

Thank you for reading this answer and please feel free to write to me
should you require further clarification.

Best regards and God bless you all!

Walter Kny
Founder - Director
The Global eJournals Library
www.gejlibrary.com