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The study was conducted to examine the scholarly impact of health and medical journals in Africa. A descriptive informetric research approach was used to analyze 134 health and medical journals hosted in the African Journal Online (AJOL) database. Harzing's Publish or Perish (PoP) software was used to extract publication and citation indicators of the journals. These indicators include number of citations, number of paper publications, cites per year, cites per paper, and the h-index of the journals. The performance of the journals was equally examined in other major databases like Thomson Reuters and Scopus. Findings reveal that only 20 African countries contributed health and medical journals to the AJOL database, with Nigeria and South Africa producing nearly 70% of the journals. A ranked list of 29 journals was developed, with South African Medical Journal and African Health Sciences ranking highest in the list, respectively. Only 14 of the journals were found in Thompson Reuters, while Scopus...

Between 2018 and 2019, two librarians at the College of Charleston Libraries incorporated cloud-based technologies into their collection management workflows. The following paper was derived from a...

The paper reports findings from a study to identify characteristics of serials with title changes and then make recommendations for recognizing new works for these serials. Findings show title changes occur due to underlying subject, function, corporate, geographic, frequency, or format changes, with 80.8% of the changes being subject or function changes. It is recommended that reasons for title changes be determined from clear statements in text or elsewhere, and that new works be recognized based upon the requirements of a definition of a work. With the FRBR definition, a new work would be recognized only for a significant subject or function change.

Depressed economic times often lead libraries to consider new practices, including alternatives to the traditional subscription model. This column discusses a pay-per-view (PPV) model for acquiring journal articles whereby a library creates an account with a content provider and then authenticated users can purchase articles at the library's expense. To gain insight into the current use of this model, the paper draws on both a literature review and the results of a survey assessing the practices of academic libraries with experience acquiring articles through unmediated, user-initiated pay-per-view transactions. The future of the PPV model as well as issues and challenges that it raises are also considered.

Recent discussions on Open Access (OA) have tended to treat OA journals and self-archiving as two distinct routes. Some supporters of self-archiving even suggest that it alone can bring about full Open Access to the world's scientific literature. In this paper, it is argued that each route actually corresponds to a phase in the movement toward Open Access; that the mere fact of self-archiving is not enough; that providing some branding ability to the repositories is needed. However, doing so will eventually bring about the creation of overlay (or database) journals. The two roads, therefore, will merge to create a mature OA landscape.