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The purpose of this paper is to investigate how extensively LOCKSS/CLOCKSS, Portico, and e‐Depot provide long‐term digital archiving for the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

The paper uses publicly available online data, which are processed in a set of PERL programs to measure the number of DOAJ articles in the three archiving systems.

The findings show that only 8 per cent of the DOAJ titles are in LOCKSS/CLOCKSS and only 5 per cent in Portico. The findings also suggest that it could take eight years to archive all full text DOAJ articles in e‐Depot based on current plans.

The most important implication is that most open access titles listed in DOAJ currently have no effective long‐term digital archiving.

The paper investigates how extensively LOCKSS/CLOCKSS, Portico, and e‐Depot provide long‐term digital archiving for the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

The purpose of the paper is to provide a comparative retrospective analysis of Bulgarian, Turkish and Croatian Open Access (OA) journals added in Directory of Open Access journals (DOAJ) in the period 2002-2013.

First of all, the study is focussed on brief review of definitions and descriptions of the OA as a global movement. In the study were analyzed the three main OA initiatives and was shown the difference between Golden Road and Green Road. Second of all, the authors used the comparative approach and made a comparative study of the OA journals in Bulgaria, Turkey and Croatia and present the evaluation results and findings.

Qualitative and quantitative data for the study are collected by the DOAJ. The data are analyzed in terms of quantity and period, and the results are presented graphically and tabular and finally there are made major specific conclusions and recommendations.

The paper shows that OA in the digital space has an important position in scientific research. There are many discussion issues related to the problems of OA, but overall study of OA to scientific information, and in particular comparative study of Bulgarian, Turkish and Croatian journals in the DOAJ does not exist at the moment.

The study aims to monitor the status of open access (OA) journals published in Developing 8 (D-8) countries, i.e. Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Malaysia, Nigeria, Pakistan and Turkey.

The authors' web-based data sources for journal-based metrics were the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Thomson Reuters (Journal Citation Reports [JCR], which provided journal impact factors [JIF]) and Scopus (source normalized impact per paper [SNIP] and SCImago journal rank [SJR]). The authors obtained information about journals published before 2000 to 2014. From the JCR, JIF, Rank in Category, Total Journals in Category, Journal Rank in Category, and Quartile in Category were used.

The authors' identified 1,407 OAJ published in D-8 countries. Egypt published the most journals (490) and Bangladesh the fewest (29). Egypt, Iran and Turkey accounted for approximately 73.5 per cent of all journals. At the time of study, 10,162 journals were registered in DOAJ, and 13.8 per cent of them were published in D-8 countries. The mean JIF for all journals from individual countries was highest for Pakistan (0.84), followed by Iran (0.74) and Turkey (0.57). The mean SNIP for all journals from each country was highest for Nigeria (0.57), followed by Egypt (0.57) and Pakistan (0.51).

The widespread use of OA publishing models in D-8 countries will boost accessibility of their journals’ content and ultimately impact research in D-8 states.

Journals published in Egypt, Iran and Turkey account for approximately three-fourths of all OA journals published in D-8 countries. More than one-third (38 per cent) of the journals the authors studied used a Creative Commons (CC) BY license, a hallmark of OA research findings. Most of the journals with a JIF were in the JCR Medical Sciences category (60 per cent). As the number of journals in D-8 countries increases, publishers should attempt to make their journals eligible for indexing in-citation databases. The authors recommend efforts to improve the quality of journals in other subject categories, so that as many as possible become eligible for indexing in JCR.

The academic community has warned that predatory journals may attempt to capitalize on the confusion caused by the COVID-19 pandemic to further publish low quality academic work, eroding the credibility of scholarly publishing.

This article first chronicles the risks of predatory publishing, especially related to misinformation surrounding health research. Next, the author offers an empirical investigation of how predatory publishing has engaged with COVID-19, with an emphasis on journals related to virology, immunology and epidemiology as identified through Cabells' Predatory Reports, through a content analysis of publishers' websites and a comparison to a sample from DOAJ.

The empirical findings show that there were 162 titles related to these critical areas from journals listed on Cabells with a range of infractions, but most were defunct and only 39 had published on the pandemic. Compared to a DOAJ comparison group, the predatory journal websites were less likely to mention slowdowns to the peer review process related to the pandemic. Furthermore, another 284 predatory journals with COVID-19 engagement were uncovered from the initial exploration. These uncovered journals mostly centered on medical or biological science fields, while 42 titles came from other broader fields in social science, other STEM or humanities.

This study does not prove that predatory publications have released misinformation pertaining to COVID-19, but rather it exemplifies the potential within a complex academic publishing space. As these outlets have proven to be vectors of misleading science, libraries and the broader educational community need to stay vigilant as information intermediaries of online research.

The aim of this paper is to conduct a study regarding the indexing of open access journals in three large, commercially available full‐text aggregation databases and using Journal Citation Reports Metrics File to further explore the journals that were being indexed.

Using publicly available database title lists produced by the full‐text aggregation database publishers, titles and title metadata were analyzed and compared to data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and Journal Citation Reports (JCR) metrics file in order to investigate the availability of open access (OA) scholarly journals. Subject Category Impact Factor Ranking Quartiles and Percentiles (SCIFRQs and SCIFRPs) were used as part of this investigation as indicators of the research significance of these OA journals.

Results showed that very small percentages of open access journals were indexed in each of the full‐text aggregators studied. A total of 7.9 percent of titles included in journal citation reports were OA journals. This study also reports the averaged SCIFRPs of OA journals for all subject areas with more than five journals included in JCR. The average SCIFRP for OA journals included in JCR was 34.49 percent and the averaged SCIFRP for all OA journals indexed by full‐text aggregation databases being studied is 41.2 percent. This study points to large differences in the rate of indexing OA journals by different databases.

Unlike past studies into the indexing of OA journals, this is not limited to selected subject areas and shows indications of the research prominence of OA journals with JCR derived data.

Open access journals (OAJs) offer immediate, free and unrestricted online access to the scholarly literature. The purpose of this study is to trace the status and characteristics of OAJs published across the globe. Various trends that have evolved in OAJ market have been studied.

The study is based on data collected from one of the largest OA journal directory – Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The data were downloaded on 02 January 2018 and details of OAJs added to DOAJ till 31 December 2018 were harvested, codified and further analyzed in SPSS software. A Microsoft-Excel template application – MAKESENS – developed by Finnish Meteorological Institute (Finland) in 2002, was explored to perform Mann–Kendall Test and Sen’s Slope Estimates.

A less score of OAJs offer access to their archival content. An increasing trend is witnessed in the OAJ publishing with Elsevier, Sciendo and BioMed Central (BMC) as the top publishers. Majority of publishers are from high-income zone countries, followed by upper-middle and lower-middle zone countries. Majority of OA publishers are from the UK, Indonesia and Brazil. A lesser score of journals offer article processing charges and/or author submission charges. Majority of OAJs from high- and lower-middle-income zone countries levy submission/processing charge to authors compared to OA journals from upper-middle- and lower-income zone countries (p < 0.01). OJS stays a prioritized platform for hosting OA journal content. Portico and CLOCKSS/LOCKSS are mostly used for long-term preservation purposes. Majority of OAJs from high-income zone countries participate in digital arching initiatives compared to ones from other income zones. Majority of the journals adopt a peer review (double-blind peer review, blind peer review, peer review and open peer review) process for validation of their scholarly content. The time lag between submission and publication ranges from one to 53 weeks, with majority of OAJs having a time lag of 11-20 weeks. Creative Commons Licenses are mainly adopted by OAJs.

As the study is based on the data offered by DOAJ, any gaps in the DOAJ data will also get reflected in the study. Further, there might be other OAJs also that have yet to show compliance with DOAJ standards and get indexed with it.

The study tries to showcase the current status and characteristics of OAJs.

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).

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.

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.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to look at third party journal portals, which facilitate the low-cost publishing of open access journals. Portals have become very important enablers for converting journals published by scholarly societies and universities to open access, in particular in the social sciences and humanities.

Portals were identified using a combination of methods including a literature search, interviews with experts, a key word web search and by analyzing web addresses and publishers in data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

In total, 21 portals fitting our definition were identified. Together these published more than 6,000 journals. They contribute around 10 percent of the journals indexed in the DOAJ, and the content is very highly skewed to certain countries, in particular Latin America and Asia.

While there have been earlier case study reports about individual portals, especially SciElo, this is probably the first systematic study of this phenomenon as a whole.

This paper aims to analyze open access (OA) scholarly publishing patterns as well as OA policies and mandates across European countries.

The study is based on a descriptive research approach using data from Web resources, directories and bibliographic and citation databases, namely, DOAJ, OpenDOAR, SCImago journal and Country Ranking portal, ROARMAP and Web of Science.

The findings indicate that the initiatives and measures in Europe that promote OA are adequate. OA journals and digital repositories have progressively increased over the past two decades. Of the total journals (n = 25,231) published worldwide and indexed in Scopus, 53% are published in European countries, with 23.7% being OA journals. In total, 34% of the OA repositories (n = 5,714) are in European countries. The proportion of OA journal papers has grown significantly in all European countries, with a 14.3% annual growth rate. The average proportion of OA publications in European countries is significantly higher (39.07%) than the world average (30.16%), with a clear inclination for making research literature openly accessible via the green OA route (79.41%) compared to the gold OA route (52.30%). Most European research funders and institutions have required researchers to make OA available for their research findings, either by publishing them in OA journals or depositing accepted manuscripts in repositories.

The study analyzed OA trends in Europe; other continents and countries were not included in the analysis. The study only described OA policies and mandates; the extent to which the OA policies and mandates were implemented was not studied. However, the results of the study may be helpful to policymakers, funders, research institutions and universities in other countries in adopting and implementing OA policies and mandates.

To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the study is the first that used multiple data sources for investigating different facets of OA publishing in European countries, including OA journals, digital repositories, research output, mandates and policies for publicly funded research. The findings will be helpful for researchers and policymakers interested in promoting OA adoption among researchers worldwide.