Despite the availability of international journals, local journals still have a vital role to play in disseminating local knowledge, translating it into policy and practice, and contributing to national development.
The issue is complicated by the increasing availability of journals via the internet and also by the sheer number of journals available, for example there were 139 journals in the 2001 'Surgery' category of the Science Citation Index (SCI, from Thomson Scientific, 2004) and many other journals also include papers on surgery.
The limitations of the study include its cross-sectional design and the availability of the journal for citation and publication standards analysis.
We were surprised to learn that the availability of renal journal articles did not differ between subscription-free databases and subscription-based databases.
This finding reflects the preference for peer-reviewed journals as a general information source and may reflect the greater availability of journals to clinicians in hospitals.
The results show that OA already has a significant positive impact on the availability of the scientific journal literature and that there are big differences between scientific disciplines in the uptake.
Previous to the widespread availability of journal webspace for additional information, it could have been argued that some aspects of poor reporting were necessitated by word restrictions.
Examination of the impact of publication type (journal vs. non-journal documents) on the availability of feasibility information however revealed that non-journal documents provided information about significantly more feasibility criteria than journal articles (t(116) = 3.56, p=0.001).
For this reason, additional articles (10 articles each, given 1/10 weight each) were included for the 26 largest volume journals so that more reliable results, particularly concerning the availability of green copies from the journals in question, could be obtained.
Finally, an important point to consider in the electronic era – the availability of web access opens up journals to a whole new group of readers, of varying scientific backgrounds.
The reason for our using the WoS database is the availability of data to calculate the journal IF for countries which was not available in the standard JCR.
