scope:

Purpose and Scope

The recommended practice guidelines presented in this document offer guidance to e-journal publishers and providers that will help ensure that e-journal content can be reliably discovered, cited, and accessed by users over time.

Electronic journals (e-journals) are a critical component of the global scholarly infrastructure. As is the case with print journals, the contents of e-journals and their related metadata become part of the historical scholarly record. Citations to articles in print journals, and now in e-journals, form the basis for much scholarly research.

The publishers and providers of e-journals take great pride in the diverse designs of their websites. Yet how these websites present, identify, and link together the publications that they display can make the end user's task of discovering articles and accessing them easy, frustrating, or completely fruitless. The issues that are involved have been well summarized in "In Search of Best Practices for the Presentation of E-Journals" (Regina Romano Reynolds and Cindy Hepfer, Information Standards Quarterly, v. 21, issue 2 (Spring 2009), pp. 18-24).

The NISO PIE-J Working Group's goal is to communicate guidelines that are short and simple, incorporate a minimum of jargon, and provide clear examples of good presentation of online journal content.

The recommended practice guidelines address the following:

• Retention of title and citation information under which articles were originally published.

• Display of title histories, including information relating to title changes and related metadata.

• Display of correct ISSN for different formats and for changed titles.

• Retention and display of vital publication information across the history of a journal, including publisher names; clear numbering and dates; editors, editorial boards, and sponsoring organizations; and frequency of publication.

• Graphic design and inclusion of information that allows easy access to all content.

• Special considerations for retroactive digitization.

The presentation of e-content is a broad and detailed topic, many aspects of which are not covered in these recommendations. To achieve the working group's goal of enabling e-journal content to be reliably discovered, cited, and accessed by users over time, these recommended practices have a deliberately narrow focus on e-journals-whether born digital or retroactively digitized-and on only those elements of an e-journal that relate to the presentation of title information and supporting metadata, plus practices related to title identification and content access over time.

Specifically, the recommended practices do not address or apply to:

• Content that is continuously updated, i.e., "integrating resources" such as databases, loose leaf services, many reference works, and most websites. The focus of integrating resources is to present current content rather than to provide long-term discovery of and access to earlier content.

• Many aspects of journal website design, unless the practices relate to proper title presentation and journal history or enable ready access to content.

• Many overall aspects of how a journal should be published. (Guidelines on publishing scholarly journals and other periodicals are found in ISO 8:1977, Presentation of Periodicals.)

• While Section 508 (of the U.S. Rehabilitation Act) standards on Web accessibility are not discussed in PIE-J, publishers and providers should consider Web accessibility in overall website design. For more information, see:

http://www.section508.gov/index.cfm?fuseAction=1998Amend

Application of the recommended practice guidelines offered here will result in improved discovery and access for users. This will benefit researchers, authors, librarians, online providers, and publishers. Authors' work will not be "lost" due to well-meaning but historically inaccurate citations; researchers will find the information that they need; librarians will have better control of their collections; and online providers and publishers will benefit from increased use of their publications. Not inconsequentially, treating each distinct title in a journal's history as a separate title will result in an increase in the number of titles that publishers can include in their packages and align the counts more closely with the number of titles libraries report having in their collections. Moreover, when all titles in a journal's history are displayed and researchers can locate them, overall journal usage counts and the possibility of additional citations will increase.

Throughout the recommended practice guidelines, constructive advice is included to help with the presentation of born-digital content as well as to support the continued digitization of content from journals originally published only in print. An appendix of examples is included with an eye towards demonstrating that there are many ways to provide clear and accurate information that will facilitate long-term access to e-journal content.