Open access practices of selected library science journals

The data in this set was gathered to analyze the open access practices of library journals. The data was culled from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Proquest database Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), and a sample of peer reviewed scholarly journals in the field of Library Science.

Starting with a batch of 377 journals, the researchers focused their dataset to include journals that met the following criteria: 1) peer-reviewed 2) written in English or abstracted in English, 3) actively published at the time of analysis, and 4) scoped to librarianship. The dataset presents an overview of the landscape of open access scholarly publishing in the LIS field during a very specific time period, spring and summer of 2023.

Methods
Data Collection

The researchers gathered 377 scholarly journals whose content covered the work of librarians, archivists, and affiliated information professionals. This data encompassed 222 journals from the Proquest database Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), widely regarded as an authoritative database in the field of librarianship. From the Directory of Open Access Journals, we included 144 LIS journals. We also included 11 other journals not indexed in DOAJ or LISA, based on the researchers’ knowledge of existing OA library journals. The data is separated into several different sets representing the different indices and journals we searched.

The first set includes journals from the database LISA. The following fields are in this dataset:

Journal: title of the journal

Publisher: title of the publishing company

Publisher Type: the kind of publisher, whether  association, traditional, university library, or independent

Country of publication: country where the journal is published

Region: geographical place of publication

Open Data Policy: lists whether an open data exists and what the policy is

Open Data Notes: descriptions of the open data policies
Open ranking: details whether the journal is diamond, gold, and/or green

Open peer review: specifies if the journal does open peer review

Author retains copyright: explains copyright policy

APCs: Details whether there is an article processing charge

In DOAJ: details whether the journal is also published in the Directory of Open Access Journals

The second set includes similar as the previous set, but it also includes two additional columns: 

Type of CC: lists the Creative Commons license applied to the journal articles

In LISA: details whether the journal is also published in the Library and Information Science Abstracts database

A third dataset includes eleven scholarly, peer reviewed journals focused on Library and Information Science that were not in DOAJ or LISA. This dataset is also labeled with the same fields as the first dataset. 

The fourth dataset is the complete list of 377 journals that we evaluated for inclusion in this dataset.

Data Processing

To explore the current state of OA scholarly publishing in librarianship, we developed the following criteria: Journals must be published at the time of analysis, peer reviewed, and scoped to librarianship and must have articles or abstracts in English so that we could determine the journal’s scope. After applying inclusion/exclusion criteria, 145 of 377 journals remained; however, the total number of journals analyzed is 133 because the DOAJ and LISA shared 12 journals. The researchers explored the open data policies, open access publication options, country of origin, publisher, and peer review process of each of the remaining 133 journals. The researchers also looked for article processing costs, type of Creative Commons licensing (open licenses that allow users to redistribute and sometimes remix intellectual property), and whether the journals were included in either the DOAJ and/or LISA index.

References:

Budapest Open Access Initiative. (2002) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/