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When is a Journal a Journal (Was Biomed Aggregators) 

Below, I reproduce two extracts of messages:

o from May Kay, who tells us about full text of journals avaiable through
aggregators, but not accessible in the "usual sense" and

o from David Goodman who says that this won't do, in part because of
text-only features (though that could change quickly) but I suspect in
part because through these aggregators, the journals are not accessible as
journals, but rather as articles accessible through certain types of
searches. That is, I'm not sure one could do a systematic search or a
"browse" through, say, Science, via Lexis-Nexis, whereas one could do that
through a subscription for the online version of Science. 

Before this topic was raised, I had already observed that a number of of
academic library web sites feature e-journal sections in which ejournal
titles are listed.  Why, I asked myself, does my institution list only
1,000 items or so, while others list thousands?  The difference was
simple: the bigger lists include titles out of aggregators (Lexis, Ebsco,
UMI, etc.) databases and at my place we have not considered those as
"real" journals even though they are included in these databases.  Well, I
shouldn't quite say that; rather I should say that we simply haven't
thought about it and it is now time to do so. 

So, some of my questions are:

1.  Are the ejournals included in aggregators' databases *real?*
2.  How and how not?  For whom?
3.  Therefore, do they or do they not deserve to be enumerated in
    in an ejournal list on our web sites?  
4.  Should they be catalogued as an ejournal in our online catalog? We
    do catalog individual titles that we license or can access as
    *individual*
    titles.
5.  Do the aggregators supply bib records for these ejournals?  If not,
    how did you get them into your lists or catalogs?
6.  Is the answer "it depends?"  If so, on what does it depend?

We very much welcome your thoughts on this matter.

Ann Okerson
Yale University

________________________

David Goodman wrote:

>Lexis-Nexis and Dow-Jones do not offer full-text access for any journal
>in the usual current sense; they offer the actual words of the text only,
>** without ** the illustrations and tables. This of course completely
>rules them out of serious consideration in the sciences and, according to
>my colleagues, in essentially all other areas also.

Mary Kay wrote:  

>For those in pursuit of online access to Science:
>
>It's available fulltext on Lexis/Nexis 1983- , on Dow-Jones 1995- ,
>and on Periodicals Abstracts fulltext file (which we subscribe here at
>Humboldt) 1992- , according to the coverage lists.  I've accessed it on
>DJ, could test the others if it would be helpful. 
>
>Ann Okerson asked me if I would share the biology titles I identified on
>L/N and D/J, so I'll do that.  I excluded most biotechnology and other
>forms of applied biology so someone else might come up with a more
>expanded list.  Humboldt State has an environmental and ecological
>focus, so I was looking for such titles.


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