The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a list of peer-reviewed, fully open access journals. DOAJ's clearly defined vetting process makes it attractive as a means of measuring open access publishing. DOAJ numbers, over the past couple of years, have consistently indicated strong growth in fully open access journals (for details, see The Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series). An examination of DOAJ titles by start year as of today indicates strong, continuing addition of recent new titles (e.g. 289 with a start date of 2005, 311 with a start date of 2004)....
Recent data, DOAJ titles by start year 2006 and 2007 are not presented here. Please see explanation below.
...The start year in DOAJ is the first year articles are available as OA, not the first year the journal started. An older journal which converts, but does not have older copies online, will have a different start date in DOAJ than the first year of publication.
Recent start years are always likely to be understated. New titles must be identified by DOAJ, or present themselves to DOAJ. Also, DOAJ is a vetted list. New titles are only added after they have gone through this process, to ensure that the title is indeed open access and meets peer-review or equivalent quality control status, and after enough articles are published to warrant inclusion. What this means for DOAJ numbers: recent title figures will always be understated. Many journals begun in 2006 have not yet gone through a full year of publishing, and these titles will not have completed the DOAJ vetting process. The current year will always be understated, for this reason and also because, until the year is complete, new journals are likely to start....If short-term growth dips a little at DOAJ, it most likely means that someone is on vacation.
DOAJ start years are subject to change. This may be counterintuitive: due to changes in open access status, or digitization of back issues, DOAJ start years are likely to change....Journals that no longer meet the DOAJ criteria and are weeded from the list will cause a drop in their start year count.
This explains how Sally Morris, based on research conducted in the early part of 2005, came to the erroneous conclusion that OA journal start-ups had peaked in 2001, with slightly fewer than 180 journals counted. Sally and her group of volunteers counted only 80 journals in DOAJ with a start-up year of 2004, and concluded that OA journal start-ups had dropped. At the time of counting, journals that had started in 2004, and some in 2003, are likely to have still been unknown to DOAJ, or not yet completed the vetting process....
At the time of counting early in 2005, Sally reports that there were 1,443 journals then listed in the DOAJ. As of today, there are 2,842, nearly twice as many. This illustrates an increasing trend towards OA publishing, not a decline.
The year 2004,the low point on Sally's chart, is today's apparent peak. Sally and her group counted about 80 journals in DOAJ with a start year of 2004; today, DOAJ records 311 journal start-ups in 2004, nearly 5 times more than at the time of Sally's count. This illustrates two things: my point that titles in recent years will always be understated in DOAJ, and also that OA start-ups at the time of Sally's study were not declining, but rather increasing....
Sally Morris' conclusions and data can be found in the Personal View (not peer reviewed) article, When is a journal not a journal? in the subscription-based Learned Publishing Vol. 19:1, January 2006....
Posted by
Peter Suber at 9/06/2007 11:50:00 AM.
The open access movement:
Putting peer-reviewed scientific and scholarly literature
on the internet. Making it available free of charge and
free of most copyright and licensing restrictions.
Removing the barriers to serious research.
I recommend the OA tracking project (OATP) as the best way to stay on top of new OA developments. You can read the OATP feed on a blog-like web page or subscribe to it by RSS, email, or Twitter. You can also help build the feed by tagging new developments you encounter.
