ScienceDirect (http://www.sciencedirect.com), as a product of Elsevier Science--itself a subsidiary of publishing giant Reed Elsevier plc--is a dominant entity in the online journal market today. Touting itself on a previous version of its home page as "Science at the Speed of the 21st Century," ScienceDirect is best described as a "megasource" for over one million online articles, dated 1995 to present, which are available from more than 1,100 journals from Elsevier companies and other participating publishers. By agreement, additional publishers and information providers participate bibliographically in ScienceDirect, listing their articles but providing only abstracts, not full text. Elsevier Science describes ScienceDirect as one of the largest science, technology, and medicine--or STM--online full-text article databases in the industry. Indeed, a running count of the number of articles available is posted on the home page. The bulk of the included journals are from the socalled hard sciences and engineering, with many biomedical journals also included. Note that the term "science" in ScienceDirect is used in the broadest academic sense to include the social sciences with some business, economics, management, and library science journals also available. DELIVERY PLATFORM OPTIONS As an information provider, ScienceDirect offers a vast and powerful yet somewhat-confusing array of services designated as a "family of products" that is available on different platforms to institutional customers, i.e., libraries, research centers, government agencies, or sci/tech companies. These customers choose a platform from the suite of services offered. Each of these services provides access to a set of selected full-text (HTML or PDF) journals as online subscriptions.
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