Directory of Open Access Journals in Keywords. Distribution and Themes of Articles

Abstract

Researchers depend on consultation with previous work in their field, most of which is published in scientific journals. The open access movement has affected journals and articles, providing new alternatives for accessing scientific content, and the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is the most specialized and multidisciplinary database of open access journals. The main goal of this study is to analyze publications that include “DOAJ” in their keywords, to determine how researchers in the areas of Library and Information Science and Social Science are studying it. The specific objectives are: a) to describe the characteristics of journals indexed in the Web of Science, DOAJ, or SCOPUS that have published articles with “DOAJ” as a keyword; b) to identify the institutional affiliations of the authors of those articles; and c) to classify the articles according to subject area. We identified 39 articles from 29 journals. The countries with the largest numbers of journals are the United States and the United Kingdom (six journals each). Most of the journals were open access, of which universities were the biggest publishers. The countries with the largest numbers of authors were India (12), and Italy and Russia (11 each), and the journal that published the most articles was the University of Nebraska’s Library Philosophy and Practice (four articles). Most articles analyze the quality (65.5%), followed by the growth (25.6%), of the Open Access Movement. An analysis of the subject areas covered revealed significant gaps, as the economic, legal and technological aspects of DOAJ were not represented.