Impact of Open Access Journals in DOAJ: An Analysis

The present study aims to investigate the trend and growth of open access journals at a global level, in DOAJ portal. Study is based on the data taken from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) from 2002 to 2018, a database of fully open access peer-reviewed scholarly journals. Author found that there are 12065 journals indexed in DOAJ on all the field of study. The study presents findings on the contribution to DOAJ by country, year, language, and subject. Study found that, countries like United Kingdom and Indonesia publications are more in this portal and English is the most common communication language. Most of the journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). Majority journals are Peer Reviewed journals. Medicine and Education related journals are highest in this portal, 11% of the 12065 journals in DOAJ have been awarded DOAJ special tag/designation. Contribution of Elsevier, Sciendo and BioMed Central publishers is more compared to other publications during the study period.


Introduction
Open access movement has benefited all the participants in scholarly information communication system. It has helped authors and researchers by providing enhanced visibility and increased impact of their work. At the same time, it has enabled users to access information from different parts of the world just at a click of mouse (Singh N). The Directory of Open Access Journals was launched in the year 2003 at Lund University in Sweden, with 300 open access journals and today it contains more than 12000 open access journals covering all areas of science, technology, medicine, social science and humanities. DOAJ is a community-curated list of open access journals and aims to be the starting point for all information searches for quality, online directory that indexes and provides access to high quality peer reviewed open access material. All data is freely available, 33, 24,126 articles can be searched online in this portal. Its mission is to increase the visibility, accessibility, reputation, usage and impact of quality, peer-reviewed, open access to scholarly research journals globally, regardless of discipline, geography or language. DOAJ is committed to being 100% independent and maintaining all of its services and metadata as free to use or reuse for everyone.
DOAJ is a not-for-profit an independent organization, all funding is via donations 40% of which comes from sponsors and 60% from members and publisher members. DOAJ is managed by Infrastructure Services for Open Access C.I.C. (Community Interest Company) based in the United Kingdom. DOAJ has an Advisory Board, the members carry out their duties voluntarily. DOAJ partners with a broad range of organizations. The nature of the partnership varies and includes contracts for work, collaborations, or access to information resources that assist with their application review process. DOAJ uses the services of approximately 100 voluntaries editorial staff who review applications. Volunteers are bound by a Code of Conduct and an agreement that they must sign and return to DOAJ before they can carry out their duties. All volunteers are bound by the Code of Conduct to declare any conflicts of interest to the Managing Editors. (Directory of Open Access Journals, 2018)

Review of Literature
Few studies have been made by the different researchers on DOAJ.
Waghmare and Khaparde (2016) made a scientometric analysis of 128 papers published data is collected using the DOAJ and analyzed with the help of Microsoft Excel. The study focuses on various aspects of the journal such as year wise growth of papers, authorship pattern, degree of collaboration, author affiliated institutions, length of pages and average of citations. The study found that degree of collaboration and University of South Florida topped in the institution list. Kumar and Atchamamba (2015) examined the open access journals which are listed in the DOAJ, and analyzed the open access journals on Fisheries and Aquaculture published in various years, in different disciplines, languages, countries and license wise. Researcher revealed that, the majority of journals are published by United States; English being the most common communication language, the large numbers of journals are published in Aquaculture and fisheries disciplines, while very few journals are published in zoology, biology, ecology and environmental science disciplines respectively. Further, they found that the majority of journals were published during the year 2002-2011. Kumar (2014) analyzed the total 140 free full text with abstracts online journals in environmental science were accessed through DOAJ and these journals were analyzed based on e-journals, country wise distribution, language wise distribution, year wise growth pattern, institution wise distribution of publishers, distributions of subject headings their accessibility of archives of online journals in Environmental Science. It is found from the study that the United States publishes more and more open access journals. English language is dominating the open access e-journals in the field of Environmental science with 1st Rank. A majority of the e-journals publishing in the environmental science 37(26.43%) were contributed by university. Pujar (2014) said that, 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 productivity parameters. Researcher found that, USA is contributing highest number of journals and English is the main language of communication in LIS field. Further he noted that, JCR has provided IF only for 6 (4.08%) journals. Lihitkar and Lihitkar (2013)

Objectives
The main objectives of the present study are: 1. To reveal the present status of Directory of Open Access Journals. 2. To know the subject coverage of DOAJ.
3. To find out the type of licensing used in DOAJ. 4. To study the geographical and language wise distribution of journals in DOAJ. 5. To determine the year wise growth of open access journals in DOAJ.

Methodology
The data represented in this article is accessed and easily downloaded basic information about the journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and got all the required information on 9 th September 2018 analyzed and generated tables and figures with the help of MS-Excel. Journals were analyzed based on discipline, country wise, language wise, year wise, type of license and others.

Scope of the Study
The scope of the study is limited to Directory of Open Access Journals that too limited to only top 10 subjects, publishers, country, languages and so on. And it is not covered any other directories and databases for the study purpose.  Now a days, few publishers are charging publication fee from the authors. In this DOAJ portal also there are journals that charge the authors. Even though DOAJ is an open access portal, processing fee is compulsory for few journals in this portal also. Table 2 found that, 26% of the journals are charging the article processing charges to the authors, whereas, majority 73% are not charging any charges to the authors and 68 number of journals have not provided any information related to article processing charges during the study period. On an average 218 journals are published by each publisher, and in this study only top four publishers published more than average number of journals in this portal.  Journals are published in different languages of the world; language wise distribution of journals in Directory of Open Access Journals Portal is shown in Table 5. As usual English language is the most common communication language in this world and it leads all the languages. 55% of the journals are in the English language, Spanish language journals are 14% and Portuguese language journals are 10% of the publications in this study. Indonesian language published 7%, French language 5%, Russian, Italian, German, Turkish and Persian language journals are published 3% to 1% respectively. Study revealed that majority of the journals are published in English language. Every journals impact factor is depending upon its quality of articles and these articles in the journals are reviewed by subject experts, some of them are peer reviewed and some are blind peer reviewed, Table 6 revealed that, 48% of the journals available in this DOAJ portal are double blind peer reviewed journals, followed by 28% blind peer reviewed journals and 21% peer reviewed journals. Around 1% of the journals are editorial reviewed and opened peer reviewed journals. Sixty-five journals have not mentioned anything about it. It is interesting to know that, nearly 50% of the journals are double blind peer reviewed journals.   Every publisher and journals are having license to publish and distribute the content of journals and allowed users to edit and redistribute the content in this informative world. Licenses are categorized into seven categories in DOAJ portal.

Findings
1. Study revealed that, DOAJ is a very powerful Open Access Portal for Medicine and Education related professionals, as this subject journals and articles are more compared to other subjects in this portal. 2. Majority of the journals in this portal are not collecting any article processing charges or publishing charges from the authors. 3. Elsevier publisher is the major contributor to DOAJ portal. 4. Majority contribution to this DOAJ portal came from United Kingdom, Indonesia and Brazil by contributing 33% of the journals in this portal. 5. Again, it is revealed here also that, English language journals are more compared to any other language journals. 6. If you see the quality wise distribution of the journals in this portal, 97% of the journals are peer reviewed journals. 7. Big boost to DOAJ came in the year 2017 with 22% journals were added during this year alone. 8. Only 11% of DOAJ journals got DOAJ special seal (tag) for practicing extra high level commitment to open access publications.

Conclusion
In summary, DOAJ is widespread and covers open access scientific and scholarly journals and not restricted to any specific language or subject area. Directory of Open Access Journals are increasing its share of the overall volume of reviewed journals. It has helped authors and researchers by providing enhanced visibility and increased impact of their work. At the same time, it has enabled users to access information from different parts of the world just at a click of mouse. The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the main source of information in facilitating organized access to open access literature. There is a need to raise 'DOAJ' special seal for practicing extra high-level commitment to open access publications.