Abstract
The present study aims to assess the growth of open access journals at a global level. The concept of Open Access (OA) publishing is being well received among academic circles and as a result we can see more and more scholarly content is being made these days available in open access format. The present study is simply an attempt to assess the trend and growth of open access journals during the last decade, viz. for the period 2003-2012, for which data has been retrieved from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), which as of date hosts more than 9700 journals from 120 countries across the world covering major languages of the world. But keeping in view the period of our study the data has been retrieved as per our applicability, which as a result confines our study to 8453 journals only. The directory covers 18 main subject areas having 76 sub-disciplines, each having on average 118.53 journals. During the entire decade the number of countries which entered into OA publishing rose from 49 to 120 with a growth of 144%, and if this growth rate continues to be the same for the next five years, viz. by 2018, the world will turn into 100% open access. At the continental level Europe leads the tally by publishing a maximum of 3140 OA journals contributed by 43 countries across Europe, which again is the highest number from any continent.
Highlights
The concept of open access has received greater attention in the twenty-first century, though the concept of open access has been very much prevalent since the 1980’s when the concept of self-archiving started receiving acceptance among computer scientists as they started achieving their research output (Poynder, 2004)
Morris (2006) studied 1213 open access journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and found that on average 42 articles are annually published by each OA journal
A few studies pertaining to DOAJ were reviewed in order to assess what has already been studied about the directory, and the dataset required for the analysis as per the objectives was retrieved from the home website of the directory accessible at
Summary
The concept of open access has received greater attention in the twenty-first century, though the concept of open access has been very much prevalent since the 1980’s when the concept of self-archiving started receiving acceptance among computer scientists as they started achieving their research output (Poynder, 2004). The concept of open access (OA) was not much in vogue during the 80’s and it was only in the 1990’s when the concept started gaining ground. It was Steven Harnad who in 1994 proposed the concept of open access publishing (Harnad, 2007). Lund University has been truly instrumental in the launch of DOAJ and has since continuously played a very vital role in hosting, maintaining, and partly funding the directory covering free full text scientific and scholarly journals in almost all subjects and languages
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