TY - JOUR AB - Purpose Open access (OA) electronic journals have been identified as potentially at risk of loss without more coordinated preservation efforts. The purpose of this paper is to test the current availability of OA electronic journals indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).Design/methodology/approach Using publicly available journal metadata downloaded from DOAJ, individual journal URLs were tested for validity and accessibility using a Microsoft Excel Visual Basic for Applications macro.Findings Initial results showed 69.51 per cent of the URLs tested returned a successful HTTP status code. The remainder of the URLs returned codes that indicated redirection or errors.Originality/value Unlike past studies of link decay, this is not limited to cited references or a specific discipline. This study uses the full DOAJ metadata to analyze the persistence of OA electronic journals. VL - 117 IS - 11/12 SN - 0307-4803 DO - 10.1108/NLW-08-2016-0056 UR - https://doi.org/10.1108/NLW-08-2016-0056 AU - Lightfoot Elizabeth A. PY - 2016 Y1 - 2016/01/01 TI - The persistence of open access electronic journals T2 - New Library World PB - Emerald Group Publishing Limited SP - 746 EP - 755 Y2 - 2024/09/20 ER -