Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to summarize the information about web resources in the area of mycology, one of the most important spheres of biology. Design/methodology/approach – The information on mycological web resources is systematised. Scientific journals, newsletters and...

Purpose How to obtain a list of the 100 largest scientific publishers sorted by journal count? Existing databases are unhelpful as each of them inhere biased omissions and data quality flaws. This paper tries to fill this gap with an alternative approach. Design/methodology/approach The content...

Purpose – The paper seeks to reconsider open access and its relation to issues of “development” by highlighting the ties the open access movement has with the hegemonic discourse of development and to question some of the assumptions about science and scientific communication upon which...

Purpose – This article presents the early findings of an exploratory deep log analysis of journal usage on OhioLINK, conducted as part of the MaxData project funded by the US Institute of Museum and Library Services. OhioLINK, the original “big deal”, provides a single digital platform of...

The aims of this study were to identify the retrieval features for online databases; difficulties faced by users; and retrieval features expected by users. A total of 25 databases were surveyed and 40 users were interviewed after the training sessions. Common retrieval features included Boolean...

This study evaluated two different types of online information retrieval (IR) systems: online databases and Web search engines, in terms of user generated criteria. It also compares four types of Web search engines: directories, search engines, meta‐search engines, and specialized search...

Looks at the lessons to be learned from the failure of Questia, formed in 1999, which claimed to offer a revolutionary on‐line research service for college students, providing access to the full texts of hundreds of thousands of books, journals, and periodicals. However, the expected numbers...

Purpose – This paper aims to demonstrate the role that the Google general search engine plays in the information‐seeking behaviour of scientists, particularly physicists and astronomers. Design/methodology/approach – The paper is based on a mixed‐methods study including 56...