Scholarly open access journals in medicine: A bibliometric study of DOAJ

This study aims to present a quantitative analysis of open access (OA) journals in the field of medicine indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The bibliographic data for this study was extracted from DOAJ and inserted into an Excel sheet for analysis. The retrieved data was analyzed by using different quantitative techniques to disclose the findings. The findings disclosed that 3627 OA journals related to the field of medicine are indexed in DOAJ, which represents a substantial increase from just 8 in 2002. Moreover, most of the medical journals (n = 1874 or 51.7%) do not charge any Author Processing Charges (APC) from the authors. The United Kingdom leads the world with 878 (24%) open access journal titles, whereas English is the top language of publication with 3149 (86.8%) OA journals in medicine. Elsevier is the leading publisher with 236 (6.5%) journal titles. A majority of the journals (n = 1595 or 44%) follow a double blind, peer-review process. About 2046 (56.4%) journals publish their contents under the Creative Commons (CC BY) licensing model to enable access and use of scholarly content for educational purposes.