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The present research aims to identify the difficulties and obstacles for developing digital libraries in the seven regional branches of Islamic Azad University (IAU), Iran, and to study the status of librarians' skills and education programmes at these institutions.

The 40 individuals working in the regional branch libraries of IAU were surveyed by a questionnaire consisting of 34 questions, and the collected data were analysed using SPSS software (version 16).

It was found that the most important difficulties are the lack of suitable equipment and untrained personnel (i.e. a lack of sufficient training programmes).

Because of the small number of participants, it is suggested that a larger scale study is carried out. It is also proposed that the suggestions made by the participants will be considered and implemented, based on the digital library (DL) developments in academic libraries in different countries.

It is expected that with improved library management, and the solving of the problems highlighted, through suitable training programmes, librarians will contribute more actively and effectively in establishing and managing DLs in the surveyed libraries.

This research can contribute to existing knowledge in the areas of information technology and digital library management, especially in academic arenas. The paper helps librarians do their best in the new environments.

The present study aims at determining the most accredited free English electronic journals (EJs) in Medical Sciences, as finding free scholarly EJs including medical ones is difficult in the web environment.

The research population consisted of 700 free EJs of Medical Sciences, which were collected from two reputable websites, namely, Directory of Open Access Journals and Free Medical Journals. After first screening, 269 free EJs including 76 journals in health, 4 journals in nursing, 175 journals in medicine and 14 free EJs in dentistry remained for final investigation […].

The most accredited journals in four medical disciplines studied here are health: New South Wales Public Health Bulletin, PLoS Biology and Environmental Health Perspectives – National Institute of Environmental Health Sciences; nursing: Online Journal of Rural Nursing and Health Care and Online Journal of Nursing Informatics […].

This research can be treated as an addition to the webometrics literature.

This research aims to study the state of online resources cited in scholarly library and information science (LIS) journals which are ranked in ISI and available in the Emerald database in terms of accessibility and decay.

Four LIS journals published by Emerald were selected from Thomson Reuters' JCR. The journals' issues from 2005 to 2008 were downloaded directly from the publisher web site and checked in terms of decay and availability of individual cited URLs.

Original accessibility of studied online resources was 64 percent, which improved to 95 percent. The main adopted strategies that returned more results were using the Wayback Machine and Google, which revived online resources by 17 percent and 12 percent respectively.

To increase the rate of web citations accessibility, some recommendations, including avoiding long URLs, citing documents found in digital collections availability on the web, working through systematic checking of the web citations before publication, getting backup of cited information, using the more stable file formats and domains, and utilizing tools like WebCite^®‐enhanced reference and a digital object identifier (DOI^®) system are suggested.

A study which examines the accessibility and decay of web citations used by authors of articles published in ISI‐ranked LIS journals available in the Emerald database has not been already done. This paper can thus contribute to the knowledge of this field as well as quality of such literature for web content providers and publishers, authors and researchers.