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.
