Review of Open J-Gate

Henk Ellermann, Open J-Gate, In Between, May 29, 2006. Excerpt:

Some time ago, while drawing my reader's attention to an article in Cites and Insights by Walt Crawford, I mentioned Open J-Gate as an alternative to the DOAJ. There I followed Walt Crawford by saying that the standards for inclusion are lower for Open J-Gate than for DOAJ.  In a comment to that posting, N V Sathyanarayana, disagreed with that qualification. Open J-Gate indeed indexes more journals, but they do make clear which journals are peer reviewed and which ones are not. One can also restrict searches to peer reviewed journals only. The main difference between DOAJ and Open J-Gate is not so much the quality of the indexed papers, but the fact that DOAJ is a true directory of open access journals, while Open J-Gate offers an index (of metadata), of the journals. Both services do offer a click-able list of titles.  So I have to agree with N V Sathyanarayana that Open J-Gate is not just about "lower standards" for inclusion than DOAJ. It is a different service....

[A]lthough I admit that my previous qualification was (a tad) unjust, I still have a few minor problems with this service. First, it mentions the Open Access [sic] Initiative and calls it OAI. Now, OAI usually stands for the Open Archives Initiative. Is this a mix up or am I missing something?...Second, there are a number of links that don't work....Third, the articles are indexed based on metadata (including abstracts some of the time), not on the full text. DOAJ does offer full text searching on a (relatively) small number of articles and it would be nice of Open J-Gate would offer a similar service.

Fourth, The journals are classified using a three-layer hierarchy, but the hierarchy is not presented clearly (DOAJ does a better job here). It is only presented on their advanced search screen where it can be used (only) to limit a search term. It would be nice of such an hierarchy could be used for browsing too.

There is ample room for improvement therefore. Having said that, Open J-Gate has become one of my fav sites (on del.icio.us).