STATE-OF-THE-ART OF BRAZILIAN EJOURNALS IN SCIENCE AND TECHNOLOGY

This paper reports the partial results of a research project, sponsored by CNPq – the Brazilian Council for the Development of Science and Technology -, grand number 550693/2002-5, for the period of 2003/2006. It aims to develop a comprehensive framework of the situation of the Brazilian electronic journals in Science and Technology. With the facilities for publishing an electronic journal via Web, the first difficulty faced by the research is to identify the majority of the Brazilian ejournals in Science and Technology, due to the lack of a centralized bibliographic control information resource. An extensive research in the Web has to be done in order to map Web sites of ejournals. Besides bibliographic control devices like the SciELO portal (http://www.scielo.br), which holds a collection of more than 100 ejournals, and LatinIndex portal (http://www.latindex.org), with more than 300 ejournals - including those held by SciELO -, Google and AltaVista search engines were used. Queries were submitted like “Brazilian Journal of”, “Brazilian Archives of” etc, to identify additional ejournal sites. In each site, information was gathered about each ejournal, and stored in a database, like its knowledge area, the kind of the its editor, publication currency, technological aspects such as electronic formats used for text, availability of a search engine to the site, if the ejournal belongs to a portal. The universe of Brazilian ejournal seems segmented. It varies from high quality and consolidated ejournals - which are originated from printed journals and are published by high-tech portals like SciELO -, to emerging ones- without printed version, recently set up ejournals-, produced by research groups which could benefit the facilities of publishing in an university or research institute web servers; this universe also encompass different knowledge areas, with predominance of ejournals in health and biological sciences. After this initial phase, a qualitative research had to be carried out, based in surveys sent to the ejournals editors by email. There were different kinds of questionnaires, each one directed to a specific segment of the Brazilian ejournals universe. Questionnaires asked for information relative to ejournal business model, difficulties to maintain the currency of the ejournal, existence of long term preservation policies, use of metadata standards, troubles faced to set up an ejournal. All this information will then be compared with the Brazilian public policies relative to information in Science and Technology