I have been asked by several people to post the responses I received about this topic a while ago. With a little editing, here are the best of the responses. Thanks to everyone who sent their criteria. Lucy Wrightington, Senior Librarian Dickerman Library Wadsworth Center, N.Y. State Dept. of Health Empire State Plaza, Albany, NY 12201 phone: (518) 474-6168 _____________________________________________________________________ One consideration would be level of access. There are many supposedly free full text journals on the major directories (FreeMedicalJournals, DOAJ) that only provide access to selected articles. ______________________________________________________________________ 1) How good is it? If it's indexed in Medline, that's a big plus but I do list some that aren't, especially foreign titles in areas of interest. 2) Is it a specialty where we have students or residents? 3) How easy is it to use, how reliable is the web site? ______________________________________________________________________ We leave it up to the selectors (aka subject librarians). If they deem it valuable, we add it. ______________________________________________________________________ 1. Is it indexed currently (or in the past) by one of the index databases we currently have. Our Main ones are Index Medicus, CINAHL for Nursing, PsychInfo for psychology, EBM (evidence-based Medicine Reviews) are just some. 2. Other quality index/databases such as Elsevier's Excerpta Medica, Chem. Abstracts etc. and others like Google Scholar (AGHHH!!) which may be available to our users through other means. I also say in the past for IM (Criterial # 1) had indexed a number of journals from India then dropped them. Some are now being indexed again and databases like Excerpta Medica are indexing some of those among others. Thomson ISI Recently announced that Journal Citation Reports have added a number of "regional publications" 3. How diverse is the editorial board and what are the qualifications of some of the article editors/reviewers? I take a look to first see if it is peer reviewed, look at the location, professional credentials, and at times the articles published by some of the reviewers. If an outside U.S. publication, are there local U.S. reviewers to assist authors wishing to publish? If regional (South America, Africa, India, etc) does it appear to be a majoror significant publication of that region. Also, are many or all of the articles in English. [unfortunately, I believe that while many worthwhile publications are in other languages, researchers will tend to look to their primary language instead of waiting for a sufficient technical translation and here it is english.] 4. Is the subject matter something that some faculty member may be currently doing research on? Again, if possible look at the researcher to see if (s)he is familiar with another language. If such a specific subject area, contact the researcher to see if it is of use to them. 5. How likely do you think it might be for that journal to be cited by articles in quality journals in your area? Now or in the near future? _______________________________________________________________________________________________ I agree there are too many free journals to just include all of them. Our first criterion is that there is substantial current indexing im PubMed or another of our databases. Of the remainder, I look at the following: Is the content in one of the areas that is important to us? Might one of our users find a reference to an article in the journal in a bibliography of another article. I look at the online journal itself to see whether all of the content is there, or just a selection. At the end, it's a judgment call. I look at the publisher (society?). I don't usually include free trials. The overall problem with many of the free journals is that they are unstable. They are free today, but next month they may not be. If you try to be comprehensive, you will have to stay on top of them. ___________________________________________________________________________________________ peer reviewed is a good guess. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ Since we use (an) A-Z (vendor) to manage our list of journals (online and print) we don't have any criteria, if it is open access it is listed. We also are a part of OhioLink which has many other electronic journals that are not medically related. The number of available online journals is well into the tens of thousands. While this sound like it is hard to manage or for patrons to search through, it isn't. Serials Solutions does all the work and our patrons rarely "browse" through the list. Usually they go into the search box and type the name of the journal they are looking for. Even with a very small collection I really discourage traditional browsing through the alphabet because just even a small collection will have several pages for the letter J since there are a lot of journals that start with Journal of. ____________________________________________________________________________________________ I am curious what others do about the free electronic journals. I am also curious what they do about journals donated by doctors on a regular basis. Meaning the doctor receives an individual subscription and after about a month or two donates the journal. Since the free electronic journals change often (did you notice Wiley took away most of the free access when they absorbed blackwell?) it is too difficult to constantly update the catalog. So instead, I have a separate tab on the library webpage with a list of all electronic journals. It is easier to update a list than constantly update the catalog. __________________________________________________________________________________________ I have added a few free journals to our A to Z list; those journals are few in number and appear to me to most directly meet the need of a program; the program has relatively fewer print journals in our library to draw from than other departments; also I consider the time it takes for me to add the journal to our electronic A to Z list, make sure it is cataloged and linked properly. Also, if the journal is not in Ebsco or Gale, as FT or indexed, that is important to, since it would add content, viewpoint, and variety to our online collections. _________________________________________________________________________________________________________ I would love to hear if others actually have written selection criteria for listing free ejournals. I'm afraid ours is pretty strictly gut feeling e.g. Soil Conservation would appear to be out of scope but Employee Benefits and Compensation turns out to be useful. I have to say that I have been surprised at some of the things that do get used. _______________________________________________________________________________________ We are struggling with this issue as well. Not sure we want to clutter our ...alpha lists with a lot of esoteric free titles. We have added selectively so far. 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