Scholarly Electronic Journals in Turkey

This study aims to establish the profile of Turkish scholarly electronic journals. Initially, scholarly electronic journals were identified. Then, the journals' inventory was established and analyses for establishing a country profile were performed by using the data gathered from the inventory. Some 253 "scholarly electronic journals" were identified, and 60% of those journals are published by Turkish universities and 10% of them are electronic only. Two-thirds of the present journals have started e-publishing after the year 2000 and only four journals' back issues go back to 20 years or earlier. It is observed that, information technology is not being fully integrated into the function and process of e-publishing. For example, access points to journals' contents are limited: only 39% of the journals facilitate search in current and back issues. Again, just 19% of the present journals accept onlinearticle submission. Examination of subjects and languages of journals has shown that researchers in health sciences (37%) and social sciences (34%) are the two major groups that strive to publish in electronic journals. Other subject groups are in a slow transformation process. Languages other than Turkish are also used for scholarly communication in Turkish journals (39% of journals are in only Turkish). Some 94% of journals provide open access.