Online Journals Influence amongst Iranian Universities

Ranking is one of the key measures for evaluating universities. Progress of research at universities is often measured by the rate of its publications. It is also common knowledge in the field of research that journal publications owe their success to their impact factor. However, one of the contributing factors that affect a journal''s impact factor is the accessibility and availability of its content. The law of statistics suggests that publishing an electronic version of the journal content through online publications is likely to boost the visibility of a journal; hence, improving the impact factor. The ability to publish electronically is often received favorably by the research community. Despite advances in electronic journal publishing, only recently, online journals have made their way into Iranian university journal publishing. This paper evaluates and reports on the extent of online journal publications among Iranian universities. For the purposes of this study, 653 journals published by 183 universities were studied. The results reveal that 66.7% of all universities have online copies of their journals. This study is carried out for three categories of universities; the Ministry of Health and medical Education universities, the Ministry of Science, Research, and Technology universities(MSRT), and Islamic Azad University Branches(IAU).