Volume 50, Issue 2

This article outlines the people and motives behind the launching of Libri . International Library Review in 1950. The first volumes are analysed and the main themes delineated. Editors and editorial policy are described. Finally it is briefly discussed if the editorial policy of the journal in its early years had a national bias.

For the celebration of the 50-year jubilee of Libri – International Journal of Libraries and Information Services, an extensive bibliometric analysis has been carried out to present some qualitative and quantitative data about the journal's position in the information market and its contribution to the professional developments in the field of library and information science. The study is based on the methodology for online citation analysis developed by the Centre for Informetric Studies in Copenhagen, to facilitate a deeper understanding of journal evaluation procedures and, consequently, the evaluation of the research published in it. Highlighted features are: Libri as represented in the databases; authorship characteristics; users of the journal; export of knowledge; citation pattern; synchrone and diachrone analysis of the citation impact; citation half life; top ten most cited Libri articles; special issues published in the 1990s. The aim of the presented metric analyses is not only to provide a historical overview of the visibility and impact of an independent, international journal, but also to show an advanced method for journal evaluation and to promote the use of online citation analysis. Data presented in the 15 figures provide useful information about some properties of a scientific journal, which until now have not been highlighted in the form of scientific investigations analysing the importance and influence of a journal in a given field.

In general, publishing of any scientific literature means publishing for the library community. A big portion of scientific journals, scientific monographs and even academic text books go to libraries. Therfore publishing companies like Elsevier Science, Wolters-Kluwer, Springer, John Wiley, Academic Press and others are the biggest and surely also the most important suppliers for libraries. Any scientific library spends an extremely high percentage of the acquisition budget on journals from these publishers because of the mostly extraordinary high prices.

LIS journals fulfil a role as communicators of scholarship and research. To do this effectively they must contain papers that meet international standards, but not necessarily at the expense of possibly unique local considerations. This paper reviews the purposes and standards of LIS journals from an editor's perspective and then looks at the evaluation process for an anglophone journal in which most of the contributors and readers are from Asia.

The aim of this paper is to explain why academic library book vendors around the world must change how they do business. Their survival requires it. Restructuring a business model fashioned decades ago is not a job of tinkering with this policy or that practice, nor is it simply a framework to help cope with an environment that is highly complex and changing rapidly. It requires a new business model, from the foundation upward. New business models must emphasize vendor/library partnership, goal sharing, joint development, seamless process, and cost/benefit sharing.

Internet journals offer some remarkable opportunities for scholars in disseminating ideas and results to a global community in a timely fashion. As the brief history of the Internet journal First Monday proves, scholars and their editors and publishers have barely tested a few of the possibilities of this medium.

This paper considers the incredible changes in the journal publishing industry that have taken place during the last quarter century from the perspective of someone who has been closely involved with major publishing firms in the U.K. It speaks primarily of the changes in scientific publishing. It treats not only the publishing of journals but also the development of the journal publishing industry. The author looks at these changes from an economic, technical and behavioural standpoint. In the final section, the author looks to the future of scientific journal publishing in the world of Internet. He concludes that the need for high-quality, organised information will be as great in the future as it was in the past, but the containers for this information might well look different.

The combination of the technical opportunities offered by ICT and the financial problems arising from commercial exploitation of traditional scientific journals has brought us to the brink of a publishing revolution. Conservatism in the scientific community makes a (rapid) evolution of scientific publishing more likely. Come what may, libraries have their own responsibilities to their clients and to their parent organisations and they must play an active role in the redesign of the publishing business process. Examples are given as to how this can be done at a local level and at a national level. Optimal exploitation of the new opportunities requires the involvement of the scientists themselves.

More and more information seekers are turning to the World Wide Web as a source of ready and authoritative information. Many of these Internet users do not fully understand the new information environment in which they seek information and how it differs from the print information environment. Lured by the easy click, seduced by colourful Web sites, and convinced that the number of items they can find through Internet search engines (e.g., AltaVista, HotBot etc.), these information seekers believe that up-to-date quality information is free and only a dial tone and a click away. This paper examines the changing information environment from the standpoint of information providers and looks at the hidden agendas and values that conflict with the concept of cheap, easy-to-get, comprehensive, accurate information.