Growing Trend towards Open Access Publishing at Global Level: An Analysis of Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

摘要

Technology has revolutionized every sphere of human activity and so has it taken into its savvy the publishing world. Publishers are somewhat compelled to adapt to hybrid publishing techniques, whereby they have started offering both print and electronic format of published material, especially the way people have started showing keen interest towards the electronic documents. Increased demand for online electronic sources of information by netizens has given a good run to publishing houses to publish their documents in electronic format. Publishing scholarly content in the electronic format has gone one step ahead where it has switched over from closed format to open access. The present study has been undertaken with the view to assess the growing trend towards the open access publishing, whereby conventional means of publishing are being gradually overlooked by authors and good writers. The present study revolves round the data taken from Directory of Open Access Journals during the last decade, one of the largest open access databases which listed 8518 open access journals all over the world on its website in different languages and subjects on the day of data retrieved viz. Dec 31, 2012.