Global eJournals Library

Manual Harvesting?


Web crawlers is what helped search engine giants like Google to grow as big as to being able to index over 50 billion pages. A web crawler or web robot is a program or automated script which browses the world wide web in a methodological or automated manner. Automated harvesting of content and or data has major limitations resulting in only a small portion of the total web content being reached. For instances, it is estimated that only 5% of the world wide web has been indexed. Open access journals articles harvesting is being done for the most through automated software of one sort or another. And given how scattered they are and not organized under a unified format, such software based harvesting is strikingly limited. The result is that over 80% of open access journals articles remain "invisible" as they are not captured by the main aggregators. So, what is the solution? Do it manually!


The Global eJournal Library is the only discovery service of open access journals that employs hundreds of information professionals whose job is to visit one by one and every day thousands of websites of open access journals publishers and gather the relevant Meta Data at article level. Later, this information is catalogued according to library best practices to then provide a depth and breadth of discovery not found else where. The outcome of such a commitment is that the Global eJournal Library provides the broadest coverage of open access journals articles in the world. It is effectively the only one to make discoverable in one search Golden Journals, Embargo Journals and Corporate Journals altogether all at article level.


An additional advantage of the Global eJournal Library manual harvesting and its unrivaled reach is that it is the only method of harvesting that gives equal opportunity of visibility and distribution to all open access publishers regardless of their size and popularity. That is to say, small publishers have the same opportunity to be discovered as the big ones. This empowers the researchers to carry out much deeper and broader research that takes into account the most popular papers as well as the most hidden and rarest one. With automated harvesting, just the big and most popular publishers get visibility while the tail of papers stays out of sight. 


But if popular as well as non popular papers are all reached and gathered through manual harvesting, who guarantees that only quality papers are in? The reader or researcher is the one to judge whether a paper meets her standards and expectations. She knows her subject better than anybody else, and thus she will be the best judge of it. Those papers that are better will get more citations while others will be dismissed but the researcher has the right to be presented with every paper out there. She should be the final filter of quality. To help the researcher go through million of papers quickly and efficiently, the Global eJournal Library provide the industry most sophisticated discovery interface that enables multi dimensional search within search and semantic search. While this type of discovery technology is already standard practice with closed access content, it is not with open access content.