Open Access News

Some commentators have suggested that the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (http://www.doaj. org) are not all open access; others have expressed the view that not all are in fact current or, indeed, accessible. It has also been asserted that most of them publish very little; in response, it has been argued that this (and their relative lack of citations and financial sustainability) are simply due to the journals’ youth. I felt that it would be helpful to carry out some simple analysis of the journals in the DOAJ listing to establish whether these comments were factually correct. In the early part of 2005, I therefore enlisted the support of 21 volunteers to analyse some aspects of the 1,443 journals then listed in the DOAJ. For each journal, the volunteer was requested to identify (a) the year of the earliest article available, (b) the total number of articles (defined as ‘citeable items’, and excluding abstracts not associated with full text) published since launch, and (c) the date of the most recent article....I received responses on 1,213 journals in total. Of these, 20 journals (1.68%) turned out not to be accessible online at the time of surveying (in some cases, subsequent checks suggest that the problem was temporary; however, I have assumed that on any given date a similar percentage would be inaccessible). A further 18 (1.52%) were partly unavailable, and 10 (0.84%) were not in fact – or are no longer – full open access journals. A further 14 (1.18%) were not actually original journals – they included book series, links to advertising and product information, and articles taken from other journals. The remaining 1,150 journals turned out to be, on average, longer-established than is generally supposed (although it is not always possible to tell when a journal became open access, as some include retrodigitized archives going back, in one case, as far as 1911)....[C]ontrary to what has sometimes been claimed, the number of new starts has in fact declined since 2001....A surprising number (26) of those launched in 2004 or earlier had never really got started, publishing five articles or fewer....110 (9.74%) had published nothing since 2003 or earlier. A few did indeed signal on their website that they had closed, merged with another journal, or transferred to a commercial publisher; the remainder, however, gave no such indication. This suggests to me that the journals are probably defunct....[S]ome of the DOAJ journals have published far fewer articles than would be acceptable to subscribers under the traditional model; others have apparently ceased publication altogether, without formally notifying that fact to readers. The open access model seems to allow the creation and persistence of journals which would not survive in the traditional market – opinions will differ on whether this is a good or a bad thing.