C. González Guitián, M. Sobrido Prieto
Biblioteca del Hospital Juan Canalejo
Universidade de A Coruña
A Coruña (Spain)
Biblioteca@canalejo.org

The fast growth of Internet during last years has propitiate e-journals edition: To traditional impressed journals has been added an electronic version, but also has appeared other new, only accessible through the net. The edition facility of this publications has obligate to revise these structures and traditional rules, like peer review...

Objective and methods

The aim of this work is to examine the presence and quality of Spanish health science journals only disposable through the net.
These journals has been located using different search engines (Altavista, Google), directories and other links.

Results

From a total of 216 e-journals, 25 had exclusive presence on Internet

Accessibility

All of them have free access, two of them requires previous registration
8 offer the possibility of receiving the current issue through e-mail (news service)
8 e-journals have closed collections
Last issues of remaining 17 are distributed in the following way

Responsibility

Institutional (20%) Society (16%) Universities (12%) Personal (52%)
ISSN (28%)
Editorial Committee (56%)
Publication policy (48%)

Diffusion

English (Abstract) 24 %

Other values
Search engine (20%)
Map (28%)
Links to references (16%)
Predefined strategy (16%)

Conclusions

• Scarce institutional initiative. The mayority are personal editions
• There's no normalisation in the formal presentation (ISSN, editorial committee...)
• The contents structure doesn't follow a policy
• Reduced survival of issues.
• There's no recognition of e-journal by users
• Scarce diffusion. There's no constancy of the presence in databases and only few journals can be read in english.