State-of-the-art of Brazilian e-journals in science and technology

This paper reports partial results of a research project, sponsored by CNPq – the Brazilian Council for the Development of Science and Technology -, grant number 550693/2002-5, for the period of 2003/2006. It aims to develop a comprehensive framework of the Brazilian electronic journals in Science and Technology situation. With the facilities for web publishing electronic journals, the first difficulty faced by the research was to identify the majority of the Brazilian ejournals in Science and Technology, due to the lack of a centralized bibliographic control information resource. An extensive research on the Web had to be done in order to map Web sites of ejournals. Besides the use of bibliographic control devices like the SciELO portal (http://www.scielo.br), which holds a collection of more than 100 ejournals, and LatinIndex portal (http://www.latindex.org), with more than 300 ejournals - including those held by SciELO -, Google and AltaVista search engines were used to identify the sites of Brazilian ejournals.. Queries were submitted to those search engines like “Brazilian Journal of”, “Brazilian Archives of” etc, to identify additional ejournal sites. In each site, information about each ejournal was gathered, and stored in a database, according to its knowledge field, the kind editor, publication currency, technological aspects such as electronic text formats used, availability of a site search engine, if the ejournal belongs to a portal. The universe of Brazilian ejournal seems segmented. It varies from high quality and consolidated ejournals — which are originated from printed journals and are published by high-tech portals like SciELO —, to emerging ones — without printed version, recently set up ejournals-, produced by research groups which could take the benefits of the facilities of publishing in an university or research institute web servers; this universe also encompass different knowledge fields, with predominance of ejournals in health and biological sciences. After this initial phase, a qualitative research had to be carried out, based in questionnaires sent to the ejournals editors by email. Questionnaires were sent to each specific segment of the Brazilian ejournals universe. Questionnaires asked for information relative to ejournal business model, difficulties to maintain the currency of the ejournal, existence of long term preservation policies, use of metadata standards, troubles faced at the set up of an ejournal. All this information is being compared with the Brazilian public policies relative to information in Science and Technology