Free Citation Databases - Whose Competition and Whose Tool?

Producers and sellers of databases in biology and wildlife management face growing competition from increasingly useful citation databases available free of charge via the internet. Among the most comprehensive of these databases are Ingenta and SciBase, operated by license with publishers to sell access to or delivery of copyright cleared articles. Although these commercial services have plenty to sell, their citation databases can also be used as a free alternative to commercial databases for identifying literature for retrieval from conventional libraries.

Ingenta and SciBase cover thousands of journals cutting across many disciplines. Scirus, sponsored by the publisher of New Scientist, limits its scope to journals and websites with scientific content. In its coverage of free websites in addition to fee for view or download sites, Scirus resembles the recently abandoned format of Northernlight, which recently removed public access to its database of internet sites, but continues to provide searches and citations from its special collection database. (As in the past, access to Special Collection content is limited to paying users.)

More narrowly focused free citation databases, with federal government or other non-profit sponsorship, have the potential to impact comparably specialized commercial citation databases in wildlife and conservation related fields.

PrimateLit, once available only by subscription from the University of Washington, offers comprehensive coverage of primatology literature from 1940 to date. This free product will cut demand for commercial citation databases among primatologists worldwide. PrimateLit is now a joint project of the Primate Information Centers at the University of Washington-Seattle and the University of Wisconsin-Madison.

The free edition of Agricola competes directly with the licensed versions of the same database offered by database intermediaries ranging from Dialog to OCLC and its affiliates. The free edition lacks convenient features, such as e-mailing multiple records, found in pay services. When budgets are tight, however, free may seem much more important than features.

The Fish and Wildlife Reference Service database, operated as a service to the fish and wildlife management community in the United States, provides access to the gray literature which is a speciality of NISC's Wildlife Worldwide and Fisheries Worldwide database products.

The availability of free citation databases parallels the growing availability of free bibliographic records in Marc format from the Library of Congress and Z39.50 hosts worldwide. Although the free citation databases supported by document delivery businesses may not survive as free services in the long term, in the short term they can take customers and income from commercial database producers and resellers.

Document delivery services pose long recognized competitive threats to libraries. Both librarian and document delivery seller want to be the valued intermediary between the information seeker and the the information product. The competitive position of document delivery services relative to libraries is increased by the use of free citation databases as front ends for the services. In at least the short term, however, low cost and appropriate scope will lead librarians to select and guide users to these free citation databases as alternatives to existing commercial database products.

Links to free citation databases, mentioned above or useful in specialized libraries, as alternatives to commercial products.

Steve Johnson
Written, November 2001. Revised, January 2002. Links checked, unhidden and Fish & Wildlife Reference link updated, June 24 2002. SciBase status updated, 2 February 2003. Links fixed, 7 February 2003. 22 Dec 2003: Updated status of Fish & Wildlife Reference Service and added new free service, OWL.