Browse Your Library’s e-Journals On Your Device With BrowZine

Review of BrowZine for iPhone, iPad, and Android

BrowZine is one in a growing class of apps that allow you to read academic journals on your mobile device. However, unlike Docphin and Read, BrowZine is not limited to content from the health and medical sciences.

BrowZine has a different approach; as opposed to using the freely available data from the PubMed database, it works with certain publishers and your institution’s library to make their content available on your device. Many major publishers and big name journals are included such as Elsevier, Wiley, Springer, JAMA, and New England Journal of Medicine. Highwire press, the platform for many medical society journals, university presses, and academic societies are also included, resulting in an interdisciplinary collection of journals.

BrowZine works with libraries, which pay an annual licensing fee to make the app available to their communities, to match the institution’s full text holdings up with its journal list. The result is that you only see those journals for which full text is available, either because your institution pays for full text access or because the journal is open access i.e. freely available to everyone. Journals that your library pays for that aren’t working with BrowZine are not included in the app...