Improving the quality of online journals: Follow-up study of Elsevier's backfiles image rescanning project

A previous study by the author of 35 titles in Elsevier's Earth and Planetary Sciences digital back file package revealed that 73.6% of the 6,038 issues published before digital format was available had at least one figure with unacceptable quality. During 2006-2009 Elsevier conducted a rescanning project to improve the quality of the images in their backfile packages for issues published prior to 1995. The author conducted a follow-up study to determine the effectiveness of Elsevier's rescanning project. Although the project corrected many problems, a noticeable number of line drawings are still unacceptable, as well as images in issues published during the 1995-1998 time period.