Open Access journals in library and information science a study(1).pdf

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Annals of Library and Information Studies

Vol. 61, September 2014, pp. 199-202

Open access journals in library and information science: a study

Shamprasad M. Pujar

Deputy Librarian, Indira Gandhi Institute of Development Research, Gen Vaidya Marg, Goregaon (East), Mumbai-400 065,

E-mail: pujar@igidr.ac.in

Open access spurred by the Internet has brought in new vistas for dissemination of scholarly content in almost all the

disciplines. It has enabled agencies, publishers and individuals to distribute scholarly content online, free from licensing

restrictions and cost. Like other fields, the growth of open access has also benefited the field of library and information

science (LIS). In this paper an attempt has been made to assess the current status of open access journals in LIS covered in

Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) based on various parameters.

Keywords:

Open Access; DOAJ; Library and Information Science

Introduction

Open access has brought in new vistas for

dissemination of scholarly content. Today, world over

scholarly content in various forms is distributed

online on the internet, free of charge and free from

institutions and individuals. There has been a rapid

growth of scholarly journals, repositories, distributed

catalogues, preprint archives and others. According to

Morrison’s report (June, 2014) on growth of open

access, the size of content in some of the initiatives

such as Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE)

stands at 62 million items, Internet Archive 416

billion web pages, Electronic Journals library 45

thousand free journals, PubMedCentral over 3 million

articles and searchable articles in Directory of Open

Access Journals (DOAJ) is over 1.6 million

Many scholarly journals have embraced open access

model in a big way and their acceptance among

authors for publishing articles has also steadily

increased. Owing to its potential features, even the

leading publishers like Elsevier, Taylor and Francis,

Springer and others have introduced open access

journals

. As listed in DOAJ, open access journals

now account for 9919 titles across disciplines

. Their

number stands still higher, if such journals listed or

indexed in other directories and search engines are

also taken into consideration. Like in other fields, the

number of open access journals in the field of library

and information science has steadily increased, which

now accounts for 147 titles

. In this paper an attempt

has been made to study the status of these 147 LIS

journals to assess their continuity, licensing of

content, language/s of publication, platform for

hosting, indexing of content by abstracting and

indexing journals, etc.

Review of literature

Open access (OA) movement gained momentum from

‘Budapest Open Access Initiative’ in 2002

(http://www.budapestopenaccessinitiative.org). It was

followed by series of studies by promoters of open

access movement such as Peter Suber, Alma Swan

and others. Further, institutions like Scholarly

Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition

(SPARC) have led to the dramatic growth of open

access through various initiatives in the form of

repositories, open access journals, open courseware,

Open Educational Resources (OERs) etc. The open

access initiatives considerably influenced scholarly

communities and also forced governments, funding

agencies, universities and research councils to change

their policies to ensure that scholarly content of any

research funded by them should be publicly

accessible.

Influence

information

and

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ANN. LIB. INF. STU., SEPTEMBER 2014

communication technology is another important

factor, especially the Internet, made it possible for

open access to change the face of publishing and

distribution from pure print to online only.

Numerous studies have been undertaken by

researchers to study the growth of open access

journals. Falk in his study observed that there were

1200 open access journals in 2004 as compared to 5

journals in 1992

. McVeigh pointed out growing

coverage of number of open access journals in the

citation indexes provided by Thomson Reuters

Morris explored the status of openness of journals

included in DOAJ

. Gul, Vani and Majeed elaborated

the growth of open access journals covered in

Scopus

citation database

. The study of Laakso et al on the

development of open access publishing between 1993

and 2009 found rapid growth in open access journals

The growth of open access journals in the field of LIS

was explored in a few studies. Rufai, Gul & Shah

found substantial growth of open access journals in

LIS

. Similarly, a study by Sivakumaren et al

explored the growth of LIS journals covered in DOAJ

and found more open access journals were published

during the period 1996-2005

Objectives of study

The objectives of this study are:

To reveal the present status of open access

journals in LIS;

by any other directories, search engines or individual

titles available on the Internet.

Methodology

Journals related to the field of LIS were identified by

undertaking a subject search on ‘Library Science’

using downloaded metadata of journals from DOAJ.

From the extracted data in a spreadsheet, it is found

that total 147 titles are related to the field of LIS.

Websites of each of the journals were visited to check

the current status of the journals. Impact factor of the

journals were obtained from

Journal Citation Reports

2012.

Analysis

Country-wise distribution of journals

While looking at countrywise distribution of these

LIS journals, it was found that out of 147 titles, 37

(25.17%) titles were published from USA, 14 (9.52%)

from Brazil, 13 (8.84%) from Spain, 7 (4.76%) from

India and 6 (4.08%) from UK. On the other hand, 5

(3.40%) titles each published from Canada, Germany

and Taiwan followed by 4 (2.72%) titles each from

Crotia and Iran. Further, 3 (2.04%) titles each

published by four countries, 2 (1.36%) titles each by 9

countries and 1 (11.56%) title each by 17 countries.

The detailed countrywise distribution of journals has

been given in Table 1.

Languages of publication

ii) To ascertain the coverage of open access journals

by abstracting and indexing databases;

iii) To check impact factor (IF) of the OA journals;

iv) To find out the use of open source platform ‘Open

Journal Systems’;

v) To examine the ‘Licensing’ model used for

distribution of content;

vi) To trace the year from which open access to

articles is provided; and

vii) To have an idea of fee charged for publishing

articles

Scope and limitations

The scope of the study is limited to LIS journals

covered in ‘Directory of Open Access Journals’

(DOAJ). The study does not include journals covered

OA journals in LIS depicts 71 (48.30%) journals are

being published in English language, followed by 45

(30.61%) in multiple languages (same journal titles

publishing in more than one language), 9 (6.12%) in

Spanish, 7 (4.76%) in Portuguese, 3 (2.04%) each in

French, German and Polish, 2 (1.36%) in Croatian

and rest 1 each in different languages (Table 2).

Currency of open access publication

Out of 147 titles published in the field of LIS, 134

(91.16%) have maintained their current publishing

trends. However, there is a delay in publication of 11

(7.48%) journals for a year or more and details of 2

(1.36%) journals could not be ascertained as there was

no response from their websites. It is interesting to

observe that, open access journals have sustained

themselves in spite of competition from titles

published by commercial publishers and harsh

PUJAR: OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS IN LIBRARY AND INFORMATION SCIENCE: A STUDY

201

Table 1—Countrywise distribution of journals

Country

USA

Brazil

Spain

India

Canada

Germany

Taiwan

Croatia

Iran

France

Netherlands

Poland

Switzerland

Cuba

Italy

Lithuania

Romania

South Korea

Australia

Denmark

Argentina

Turkey

Other Countries (1 Journal each)

No. of journals

Percentage

Table 2—Language of publication of journals

Language

25.17

9.52

8.84

4.76

4.08

3.40

2.72

2.04

1.36

11.56

Open source journals platform

Impact Factor (IF)

English

Spanish

Portuguese

French

German

Polish

Croatian

Bulgarian

Farsi

Persian

Slovene

Multiple languages (same

journal titles publishing in

more than one language)

No. of

journals

Percentage

48.30

6.12

4.76

2.04

1.36

0.68

30.61

(1.36%) titles for which data could not be accessed;

remaining 47 titles have been covered only in DOAJ.

Impact factor (IF) of a journal is a measure to assess

the importance and weigh the quality of a journal in

comparison to other journals. While referring to

‘Journal

Citation Reports

(JCR) of Thomson

Reuters’, it was found that JCR has provided IF only

for 6 (4.08%) journals.

economic trends. This may be credited to the efforts

of publishers and support of authors in publishing

their articles in open access journals.

Coverage in abstracting and indexing databases

Abstracting and indexing databases play a pivotal role

in indexing and distributing research works published

in journals and other scholarly resources to end users.

Out of 147 titles, 98 (66.67%) have been indexed in

various abstracting and indexing databases such as

Library and Information Science Abstract (LISA),

Library, Information Science and Technology

Abstracts (LISTA), SCOPUS, LATINDEX

etc. Apart

from that they have been covered by scholarly search

engines like Google Scholar and full text databases

such as EBSCO, ABI/INFORM etc. Leaving apart 2

Open source and open access are bound by the same

principle of distribution of source material at no cost.

While analyzing the platform on which LIS journals

have been hosted, it is found that out of 147 titles, 68

(46.26%) have been hosted on Open Journal System

(OJS) a popular open source platform used for journal

publishing. However, still 78 (53.06%) titles are using

their own platform to host and publish journals on the

Internet. The platform could not be assessed in case 2

(1.36%) journals.

Licensing model

In true spirit of open access, LIS journals have started

adopting Creative

Commons

(CC)

license

(http://www.creativecommons.org) for distributing

content and allowing users to modify and distribute

content. However, in some cases certain rights are

reserved such as no derivative works to be generated,

not to be used for commercial purposes etc. From the

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ANN. LIB. INF. STU., SEPTEMBER 2014

study, it was found, out of 147 titles, 71 (48.30%)

have adopted Creative Commons license to distribute

the content. Such a rate of high adoption of CC

license is a welcome sign to free the content from

complex copyright regulations.

Year of publication v/s open access

these in a big way. Publishers of journals in LIS, if

adopt certain Web 2.0 tools to promote and measure

content may lead to wider dissemination of research

and bring in popularity. Quality of content and

unethical practices of publishing followed by some

journals is a worrying factor for the sustainable

growth of open access journals.

References

Morrison H,

Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30,

2014.

Available at: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.in/2014/-

07/dramatic-growth-of-open-access-june-30.html (Accessed

on 10 Jul 2014).

Rufai R, Gul S and Shah T A, Open access journals in LIS,

Trends in Information Management,

7 (2) (2011) 218-228.

DOAJ, Available at: http://www.doaj.org (Accessed on 15

Jul 2014).

Falk H, Open access gains momentum,

The Electronic

Library,

22 (6) (2004), 527-530.

McVeigh M E, Open access journals and the ISI citation

database: Analysis of impact factors and citation patterns. A

Citation study from Thomson Scientific, 2004. Available at:

http://ip-science.thomsonreuters.com/m/pdfs/openaccesscita-

tions2.pdf (Accessed on 8 Jul 2014).

Morris S, Personal View: When is a journal not a journal - a

closer look at the DOAJ,

Learned Publishing,

19 (1) (2006)

73-76. Available at: http://dx.doi.org/10.1087/09531510677-

5122565 (Accessed on 7 Jul 2014).

Gul S, Vani Z A and Majeed I, Open access journals: A

global perspective.

Trends in Information Management,

4 (1)

(2008) 1-19.

Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Bjo¨ rk B-C

and Hedlund T, The development of open access journal

publishing from 1993 to 2009,

PLoS ONE,

6(6) (2011)

e20961.

Sivakumaren K S, Jeyapragash B, Swaminathan S and

Karthikeyan J, A study on open access journals in library and

information science: With reference to DOAJ (Directory of

Open Access Journals),

International Journal of Library

Science,

6 (2) (2012) 80-87.

In order to ascertain, whether LIS journals provide

open access from their first year of publication, it was

found that in case of 111 (75.50%) journals, their year

of publication is same as year of open access and only

in case of 34 (23.13%) journals it was different and

data for 2 (1.36%) journals could not be found. It was

also observed that some of the journals increased their

open access content over a period of time, may be

owing to digitization of content of previous volumes.

Publication fee

One of the models followed to sustain open access

publishing is ‘Article Processing Charges’ (APC)

levied on authors to publish articles in open access

journals. However, from the analysis it was found

that, 138 (93.88%) LIS journals are not charging any

fee to authors and only 6 (4.08%) titles are currently

charging APC, 1 (0.68%) title is levying conditional

charges and no data could be obtained for 2 (1.36%)

titles.

Conclusion

Sustainability of open access journals in LIS is

evident from the study. Even though developing

countries are lagging behind in publishing open

access LIS journals, but a few countries have taken a

lead in publishing OA journals such as Brazil and

India. For the further growth of open access journals

in LIS, researchers and organizations need to embrace

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