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This paper examines the characteristics of 462 open access (OA) journals being published in India under the green, gold and hybrid models. The sample of journals was selected from DOAJ, IndianJournal.com and Open J-Gate. Journal characteristics were measured in terms of growth, subjects, publishers, and citations under each model. While characteristics such as growth, subject, and publisher have been identified by exploring the journal's website only, the citation count of these journals has been calculated by using Google Scholar and the Indian Citation Index. The gold road is now the most popular form of OA publishing in the subcontinent. There is a great variation in the size of OA journals and in their publishers. One publisher has more than 77 journals, but 264 publishers publish a single journal only. Overall, the OA journal landscape is greatly influenced by a few key publishers and journals. While 43% of journals charge publication fees and the fees vary from as low as US$10 to as high as US$400, the highest impact factor of the gold OA journals has been noted as 0.58. The data presented here suggest that publication fees are not a major barrier to authorship within the fields of computer science, pharmacy, and medicine. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

This article discusses a study aimed at evaluating the use of open access publishing by researchers and scholars in science and technology fields in India. Topics include the difficulties faced by researchers in India concerning the visibility and circulation of their published materials, the importance of the open access movement in science and technology fields due to the serial subscriptions crisis facing libraries throughout the world, and the importance of improved information and communication technology (ICT) facilities in supporting the open access publishing movement.

The article discusses the status of institutional repositories (IRs) in Asia, with information on the effect of information communication technologies (ICT) on academic publishing. Topics include the efforts to launch an Open Access (OA) model that utilizes the Internet to broaden access to information resources and publications, the definition of IRs as a platform through which the research output of a specific university or research organization is available, and the growth and distribution of IRs throughout Asian countries based upon survey results.

Using 17 open-access journals published without interruption between 2000 and 2004 in the field of library and information science, this study compares the pattern of cited/citing hyperlinked references of Web-based scholarly electronic articles under various citation ranges in terms of language, file format, source and top-level domain. While the patterns of cited references were manually examined by counting the live hyperlinked-cited references, the patterns of citing references were examined by using the cited by tag in Google Scholar. The analysis indicates that although language, top-level domain, and file format of citations did not differ significantly for articles under different citation ranges, sources of citation differed significantly for articles in different citation ranges. Articles with fewer citations mostly cite less-scholarly sources such as Web pages, whereas articles with a higher number of citations mostly cite scholarly sources such as journal articles, etc. The findings suggest that 8 out of 17 OA journals in LIS have significant research impact in the scholarly communication process. [Copyright &y& Elsevier]

Using 17 fully open-access journals published uninterruptedly during 2000 to 2004 in the field of library and information science, the present study investigates the impact of these open-access journals in terms of quantity of articles published, subject distribution of the articles, synchronous and diachronous impact factor, immediacy index, and journals' and authors' self-citation. The results indicate that during this 5-year publication period, there are as many as 1,636 articles published by these journals. At the same time, the articles have received a total of 8,591 Web citations during a 7-year citation period. Eight of 17 journals have received more than 100 citations. First Monday received the highest number of citations; however, the average number of citations per article was the highest in D-Lib Magazine. The value of the synchronous impact factor varies from 0.6989 to 1.0014 during 2002 to 2005, and the diachronous impact factor varies from 1.472 to 2.487 during 2000 to 2004. The range of the immediacy index varies between 0.0714 and 1.395. D-Lib Magazine has an immediacy index value above 0.5 in all the years whereas the immediacy index value varies from year to year for the other journals. When the citations of sample articles were analyzed according to source, it was found that 40.32% of the citations came from full-text articles, followed by 33.35% from journal articles. The percentage of journals' self-citation was only 6.04%. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Investigates the trend of open access journals publishing in the field of library and information science in terms of language, top-level-domain, country and time. Using authoritative print as well as online directories, the study identifies 124 e-journals in the field of LIS that are accessible freely, either partially or fully, on the Web. Of these, 12 titles have ceased their publication and remaining 112 titles are presently accessible freely on the Web. Analysis of the 112 e-journals shows that English is the most widely used language of LIS scholarly publishing. Most of these OA journals are originating either from academic or organizational domain and developed countries like USA and UK are publishing most of the OA journals. Concludes that there is a need for taking initiatives to publish qualitative open access journals from the less-developed countries. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Scholarly communication through Open Access (OA) journals has become a global phenomenon. This article reports on a study that measures the value of OA journals based on citation counts (ISI's Journal Impact Factor). It compares three highly ranked commercial electronic journals to five OA electronic journals. The non-OA journals are MIS Quarterly, Journal of American Medication Informatics Association, and Annual Review of Information Science and Technology; the five OA journals are Ariadne, D-Lib Magazine, First Monday, Information Research, and Information Technology and Disabilities. The criteria are established by ten major databases: Thompson's ISI, American Psychological Association's PsycInfo, Latin American and Canadian Health Science's LILCS, National Medical Library's MEDLINE, Scientific Electronic Library's SciELO, The IOWA Guide, CSA's LISA, EBSCO's LISTA, H.W. Wilson's Library Literature and Information Science, and R.R. Bowker's Ulrich International Periodical Directory. These basic criteria are categorized under 11 broad issues: availability, authority and review policy, scope and coverage, exhaustiveness of articles, page format, availability of hyperlinks, currency, updating policy, search facility, and other miscellaneous issues. Ten years' growth of Library and Information Science (LIS) OA journals has been measured by counting articles manually. During the last ten years the highest number of articles was published by First Monday, followed by D-Lib Magazine and Ariadne; the average number of articles per issue reported in Ariadne ranks first. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]