Are any of the journals that Greg Asner cites available through open access mediums such as The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), OAISTER, and Google Scholar? A small sample of five articles was reviewed and any journal that was cited at least three times was checked against the listed mediums. The list included 20 journals: Agronomy Journal, Annals of Glaciology, Biogeochemistry, Biological Invasions, Bulletin of American Meteorological Society, Canadian Journal of Forest Research, Climate Change, Ecosystems, Ecology, Geophysical Research Letters, International Journal of Remote Sensing, Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, Journal of Climate, Journal of Geophysical Research, Journal of Glaciology, Quarterly Journal of Royal Meteorological Society, Remote Sensing of Environment, Science, Transactions on GeoScience & Remote Sensing and Trends in Ecology & Evolution. Below is a description of the resources and the search findings.
Directory of Open Access Journals
www.doaj.org
The DOAJ “covers free, full text, quality controlled scientific and scholarly journals.” The DOAJ currently holds 3,888 journals with 260,523 articles. The DOAJ can be searched by journal, subject, title and even author. None of the above listed journals were available at this time.
OAIster
www.oaister.org
“OAIster is a union catalog of digital resources.” The catalog provides “access to these digital resources by harvesting using the OAI-PHH (the Open Archives Initiative Protocol for Metadata Harvesting).” OAIster can be searched by title, author, subject, language or entire records; moreover, format can be selected (i.e. audio, text, or visual). Although I was able to find 15,979 records on remote sensing and another 70,694 for science, neither Science nor Remote Sensing of Environment were in the journal listings. None of the 20 listed journals were in this catalog. I was able to find 17 records when I search on Greg Asner.
Google Scholar
www.google.com
“Google Scholar provides a simple way to broadly search scholarly literature.” Articles are ranked “the way researchers do weighing the full text of each article, the author, the publication in which the article appears, and how often the piece has been cited in other scholarly literature.” Searching Google Scholar is a lot like searching Google. The advance search feature allows for specific parameters like date range, journal title and more. Many of the journals were available, but only the abstract with a link to pay service such as SpringerLink, or CABI Abstract. Some articles were available; those articles that were in conjunction with a major university often had complete pdf files. One point made in the help section was to check with your library; however, if a researcher had a library with excellent resources they would probably skip Google Scholar. Of the three mediums, I found Google the most frustrating. The one bright spot was finding the American Meteorological Society website; there one can access a number of journals and bulletins including the Journal of Atmospheric Sciences, Journal of Climate and Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
Conclusions
Based on my brief analysis, Greg Asner does not appear to use open access journals. The sample size used for this analysis was very small. However, several of his articles were available at OAIster and even more on Google Scholar. Lastly, published works by Mr. Asner and his colleagues are available through CAO and AsnerLab websites.
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I didn't find many open access journals cited or contributed to by my scientist either. Really it's a bit of a shame.
ReplyDeleteAlso, I accidentally came across DOAJ (though I think I may have heard of it prior and just forgot about it momentarily), but OAIster is new to me. It sounds like a pretty good source too. Thanks for sharing! I'll have to check it out.
Actually, I was lost on the whole open access medium. Matt directed me to OAIster and DOAJ, but I am glad to share the fruits of my questions anyday.
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