Access and usability issues of scholarly electronic publications

Abstract

Scholarly communications can take place through a number of documentary forms including seminar and 'conference papers, technical reports, theses and dissertations, journal articles and review papers, monographs, edited books, and so on. Users in today's digital library world can gain access to these scholarly publications through a variety of channels, rangingfrom the websites of the producers or publishers of the information resources to a number of intermediaries and service providers, search tools and services. But with so many alternatives available to them, users often find it difficult to choose the best option to access the scholarly information they need. Each channel has its own policies and techniques for the identification, organization and retrieval of information resources, and these not only influence ,the usability of the services, but also the output that the users arelikely to get at the end of a search session.