Useful Directories for Finding Free Scholarly Electronic Journals

Alphabetic List of Serials (SciELO)

http://www.scielo.br

"The Scientific Electronic Library Online - SciELO is an electronic virtual library covering a selected collection of Brazilian scientific journals. The library is an integral part of a project being developed by FAPESP - Fundação de Amparo à Pesquisa do Estado de São Paulo, in partnership with BIREME - the Latin American and Caribbean Center on Health Sciences Information. The FAPESP-BIREME Project envisages the development of a common methodology for the preparation, storage, dissemination and evaluation of scientific literature in electronic format." The SciELO web site contained, as of March 28, 2000, thirty-five journals in the social and hard sciences. The project is not completely clear on whether they will continue to offer access to the online versions of their journals free of charge in the future, but the program ended its trial stage in 1998, and there has not been any statement that they are changing their policy yet.

Directory of Electronic Journals, Newsletters, and Academic Discussion Lists, 7th Edition (ARL)

http://db.arl.org/index.html

(Subscription needed for access to this directory.) The Directory offers the most comprehensive list of electronic journals currently available. The Directory is searchable by subject, title (including keywords), if it is peer-reviewed (although this status is self-reported by the journal, often incorrectly). You can also separate out the Discussion Lists from the Newsletters and Journals. As of February 2000, the Directory contained 1,209 peer-reviewed journals and newsletters, approximately 200 of which are free (the price of the journal is also self-reported, and often incorrectly so). The overall quality of the database is not great, with many dead links (which is understandable in an ostensibly fixed publication, published in 1997), and, as noted above, incorrect information, usually related to incorrect reporting from the journals themselves. Thus, the Directory offers a good, comprehensive list of potential electronic journals, but the results are only a starting point and need to be followed up to see if the information is still good.

Index for The Electronic Journals Collection (CIC)

Note: This web site ceased to exist May 15, 2000

Committee on Institutional Cooperation (CIC) Electronic Journals Collection web site. It is ostensibly a list of freely available journals, but some of the links inadvertently go to subscription based journals as well. Also, the list contains a large number of non-refereed journals and newsletters. The prize goes to this index, however, for having the newest journal indexed (Journal of Inequalities in Pure & Applied Mathematics), which is publishing its first issue March, 2000.

Penn Library Electronic Journals (University of Pennsylvania)

http://www.library.upenn.edu/webbin5/resources/ejspublic5.cgi/ej.html [Note: Link moved; URL changed 3/25/01 by ald]

This academic library's site contains a large number of free scholarly electronic journals. These journals are mixed in with the subscription-based electronic journals, but there is an annotation that indicates only Penn users can access those journals. It is thus fairly easy to identify potential free scholarly electronic journals. The quality control is good but not excellent. Several entries were in fact subscription based rather than freely available journals.

Scholarly Journals Distributed via the World Wide Web (University of Houston)

http://info.lib.uh.edu/wj/alpha.html

Excellent source of journal titles. Not as comprehensive as the ARL Directory, but they keep their journal list up to date and don't have dead links (at least very few). This list contains free scholarly electronic journals and only free scholarly electronic journals (they have a separate page for the electronic journals they pay for). Overall, an excellent resource for these titles.