Implications of scholarly electronic journals for users: a literature review

Abstract

The library, information science and publishing world are engaged in a lively debate over the future of both print and e-journals. E-journals have the potential to revolutionize the traditional scholarly communication system that so far has been dominated by paper journals, but this process is still at the beginning. As e-journals are a multi-faceted subject - several factors affecting their success within the academic community – the purpose of the following literature review is to examine e-journals from the user point of view, and to provide an account of the implications of e-journals for their users, as these appear in the research and professional literature. The sources are mainly from journal articles, monographs and the Internet, from 1990 to the present time. The first section of the report describes the emergence of interest in e-journal users, the developments in this area of research and some of the main investigations conducted on scholarly e-journal users. The second part explores critical aspects of e-journal services and their impact on users. Finally, the last section is devoted to discussing the solutions and strategies currently employed to overcome existing barriers to use and to increase e-journal services acceptance.