1. The Use and Value of Scientific Journals Carol Tenopir ctenopir@utk.edu University of Tennessee

3. Data From: 15,000 scientists All fields of science University and non-university settings Over 100 organizations (publishers and libraries)

4. Audiences Scientists/Researchers Publishers Librarians Funders

5. Myths Scholarly journals are not read There are too many journals Journals are only for authors Scientists know information before it appears in a journal Electronic journals will completely replace print

6. Journal articles are the most important information resource for scientists

7. Average Number of Scholarly Article Readings Per Year

8. Time Spent Reading

9. What Scientists Are Reading Approx. 50% of readings contain information that is new to the reader Over 35% of readings are of articles older than one year 84% of readings from electronic journals are of articles published in the last 8 months Older articles are very valuable to scientists’ work

10. Facts Behind the Myths Growth of journal literature is correlated with the number of scientists 1 article per 10 scientists 70% of all readings are done by non- academicians

11. Why these myths? 1Citation counts do not measure all readings 2The data from some studies done in the 1960s and 1970s was misinterpreted

12. Estimated Number of Readings

13. Amount of Journal Readings Scientists read from an average of 18 journals each year Half are read less than five times Only one in 18 have over 25 readings

14. Average Number of Personal Subscriptions to Scholarly Journals

15. Proportion of Readings of Scholarly Scientific Articles

16. Number of Separate Copies of Articles Received by Scientists 19771993-1998 ILL/Document Delivery 4 million>40 million Other39 million>60 million 43 million>100 million

17. OhioLINK: Titles Downloaded v. Print Titles Held Source: Snapshot 1998: OhioLINK

18. WWW Impact: PubMed A month worth of searches in PubMed equaled a year of MEDLINE searches (about 7.6 million) Today, the number of PubMed searches ranges from 500,000 to over one million per day

19. WWW Impact: arXiv.org Connections to LANL’s arXiv.org reached 180,000 per day in February 2001 Submissions to arXiv.org peaked at 2,800 per month in late 2000

20. Andrew Odlyzko’s 1995 article “Tragic Loss or Good Riddance?” still gets an average of 175 downloads per month.

21. Electronic Journals Electronic journal use depends on the field of science Studies show that about 50-90% of faculty use electronic journals sometimes 1/3 of total readings are from electronic journals

22. Awareness of Preprint Services ORNL Scientists 33% of scientists are aware of preprint services 10% of those aware of preprint services submit papers to them

23. ORNL 2000 Use of print indexes for locating articles dropped to zero Proportion of readings located through online bibliographic searches increased to 13.3% Over one half of readings were found by browsing: – electronic subscriptions provided by ORNL libraries, – free author web sites, or – personal electronic subscriptions People are an important source for identifying articles

24. Impacts of Electronic Publishing Electronic journals use is increasing Students prefer electronic Differences between work fields re: e-prints Peer review important to many Much e-reading in new titles Non-core readers price sensitive

25. Usefulness & Value of Scholarly Articles Information serves many purposes Highly important to these purposes Readers are willing to pay a high price for the information in their time but not in actual $$ The information results in improved performance