E-Views and Reviews: A Scholarly File To Watch

What'll They Do Next? Those savvy EBSCO folks (www.epnet.com) have premiered a Customer Satisfaction Center you should try even if you're not their customer. It's got a smorgasbord of terrific features, including free (yep, free) access to the Library, Information Science & Technology Abstract database, budget and fundraising guidelines, suggested readings from the professional literature, and much more.

In the Spotlight Gale Virtual Reference Library is a file chockablock with useful reference titles for every collection. It offers solid online content across a wide variety of disciplines (e.g., arts, literature, technology). Request a free trial at www.gale.com and see for yourself.

Quote of the week “I envision that 2006 will be a year when search engines dominate the minds of librarians and publishers...[and] Google Print and similar initiatives begin to bite.... My hope is that 2006 will also be the year when those outside [our] communities realize what we have to offer them; that organization, context, editorial values, selection, and licensed content complement the increasing amount of free materials on the web. Alexander Street will work toward this vision in earnest.... We will build on the success we saw with In the First Person, our free index to first-­person narratives, which has doubled in size as of early 2006.”—Stephen Rhind-Tutt, President, Alexander Street Press

ResearchNow
Berkeley Electronic Press. researchnow.bepress.com; request a free demo at www.urbdocs.com

A scholarly database hosted by Berkeley Electronic Press (a.k.a. bepress), ResearchNow just may be the face of the future in online publishing. Its content comes from three sources: 25 peer-reviewed bepress journals; working papers, preprints, and other “grey literature” from institutional repositories, along with materials from the bepress Legal Repository and COBRA: Collection of Biostatistics Research Archive; and items posted directly to the portal via the ResearchNow Upload Utility. The file offers “quasi-open access,” as some of the content is unrestricted while other content requires a subscription. Journals available include, among others, Global Economy Journal, Review of Marketing Science, Muslim World Journal of Human Rights, and Journal of Homeland Security and Emergency Management.

How Does It Work? The system lets you do a simple search, an Advanced search, or Browse within 70 subjects (ranging from Aerospace to Urban Planning and more).

Can You and Your Patrons Use It? I started out browsing several categories to get a sense of the contents. In the Agricultural Sciences category I found 356 matches, with 14 of the first 25 hits from peer-reviewed sources. All were from 2005, and among the “non-peer-reviewed” sources were materials from the Department of Agricultural & Resource Economics at University of California–Berkeley and Agricultural Research Division News from the University of Nebraska, Lincoln, certainly reputable scholarly sources. A Browse in Classics located 49 items, including a 2005 paper from Connecticut College while a Browse of Political Science and Government located 2,186 matches, 17 of which were peer-reviewed.

Trying a simple search, I quickly learned that this was, by default, a search in the full text (or an author search, if a name). My simple search for “mystery novels” located 40 items, including a number of Electronic Theses and Dissertations and peer-reviewed articles. Since the relevance of many of these was questionable, I searched via Advanced for “haplography.” No results. Tried searching full text for same. Nada. My next search of keywords for “public transportation” yielded no matches. When I searched the phrase in “All Fields” I got over 2600 matches, but their relevance was pretty undetectable.

The default settings of the Advanced search screen are for searching “Last Name” and “Title,” so I tried a search of last name “Smith” and title “economics” and got two matches. So I suspect that this file will be most useful in searching the grey literature for colleagues' and experts' names to see what they're working on.

Just How Good Is It? At this point, it is a solid 8. The search interface is confusing, and it isn't intuitively obvious how to get into the various sections of the portal—I had to go “home” a number of times just to get back in. Still, the underlying concept of this file is intriguing and could be a workable compromise for scholarly publishing.

What's the Cost? The one-year institutional subscription is $5470, which includes access to all 26 bepress journals, plus access to all new journals launched during the subscription period (an average of five per year) at no extra charge. This is 20 percent off the list pricing for the individual titles.

The Bottom Line This work in progress certainly indicates what's in store in the electronic arena. If you subscribe to bepress journals, you should consider a subscription; otherwise, it is recommended to large academic and research libraries.