Frontiers in Bioscience, a journal we subscribe to only in electronic format, gets my nomination for the Most Confusing Electronic Journal Award (if you have others, let me know). My reasons are two-fold:
1. not only is this one of the few e-journals that requires patrons to enter a publisher password (in addition to first using their U of M ID and password to view the password), THERE IS A DIFFERENT PUBLSHER PASSWORD FOR EACH YEAR OF PUBLICATION, and
2. once on the publisher's page, there are several options for viewing the full text articles, including "PDF Type I" and "PDF Type II." Our subscription is for PDF Type I, which is a lower quality scan of the article, but much less expensive subscription cost than the higher quality Type II.
Try displaying the full text of the following article, and you'll see the possible sources of confusion:
Single microassay for matrix degrading enzymes
Mahesh Mathrubutham and Srinivasa.K.Rao
[Frontiers in Bioscience 6, a13-16, April 1, 2001]
We have gotten two questions about this journal just in the last week, so I suspect there will continue to be more in the future.
Kathy
Posted by biomedref at June 25, 2004 02:15 PM