Shotton D. The Five Stars of Online Journal Articles – a framework for article evaluation. D-Lib Magazine Epub January/February 2012;18(1/2)
(doi: 10.1045/january2012-shotton)
The author proposes five factors – peer review, open access, enriched content, available datasets and machine-readable metadata – and a five-point scale for each of them, by which an online journal article can be evaluated. These five stars are complementary and provide a conceptual framework by which to judge the degree to which any article achieves or falls short of the ideal. They could be useful to authors, editors, and publishers.