Status of Open Access LIS journals: An empirical study of DOAJ

Abstract

Open Access is a movement started in the world of Information which makes scholarly publications available online, free of cost or any other barriers. There exist two general strategies for achieving Open Access (OA) to scholarly communication. First is  The "gold road" i.e. open access journals that make their material freely available via the Internet. Second is The "green road" i.e. authors archiving articles (self or mediated) published in traditional subscription fee journals in archives or institutional repositories that allow the content to be freely available via the Internet. The largest and authoritative gold road OA database is the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) indexing all the standard OA journals meeting the DOAJ criteria of inclusion. The findings of the study carried on DOAJ unveils that the LIS journals in open access mode have signified their presence throughout the globe in 43 countries.

The highest number of OA LIS journals in DOAJ have been found to be published from U.S. whereas India contributes only one OA LIS journal. Majority of the LIS journals prefer PDF formats while Mobi. formats are found to be the least preferred file formats. It was also observed that a majority of the OA LIS journals have not mentioned their plagiarism policy. Studies also revealed that a majority of the LIS journals do not charge Author Processing Charges (APC). Majority of the LIS journals do not possess the DOAJ seal while Double blind peer reviewing is significantly followed in DOAJ LIS journals. English was found to be the most prominent language as the medium of dissemination.