Consortial Use of Electronic Journals in Turkish Universities

The use of electronic journals has outnumbered that of printed journals within the last decade. The consortial use of electronic journals through publishers’ or aggregators’ web sites is on the rise worldwide. This is also the case for Turkey. The Turkish academic community downloaded close to 50 million full-text articles from various electronic journal databases since the year 2000. This paper analyzes the seven-years’ worth of journal use data comprising more than 25 million full-text articles downloaded from Elsevier’s ScienceDirect (SD) electronic journals package between 2001 and 2007. Some 100 core journals, constituting only 5% of all SD journal titles, satisfied over 8.4 million download requests. The lists of core journals were quite stable, consistently satisfying one third of all demand. A large number of journal titles were rarely used while some were never used at all. The correlation between the impact factors (IFs) of core journal titles and the number of downloads therefrom was rather low. Findings can be used to develop better consortial collection management policies and empower the consortium management to negotiate better deals with publishers.