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