Open access publishing: A review of publications originating from a medical college in Nigeria

摘要

Background: Open Access (OA) publishing has gained tremendous acceptance in academic publishing over the last decade. This paper reviews the number and trend of OA publishing of research papers originating from College of Medicine University of Lagos (CMUL), Nigeria. Materials and Methods: A computerized literature search of PubMed for all published articles originating from CMUL between 1976 and 2013 was conducted. The search phrase used was "College of Medicine University of Lagos". The search was conducted on March 30, 2013. All articles tagged "Free article" or "Free PubMed article" were selected. Results: A total of 1255 articles appeared in PubMed between 1976 and 2013 (37 years). At the first level of screening, 162 articles were identified as "Open Access". Second level of screening to eliminate articles not originating from CMUL identified 124 articles. Only 15 OA articles were published between 1976 and 2000 (24 years), 11 articles appeared as "Open Access" journals between 2001 and 2005 (5 years), 44 between 2006 and 2010 (5 years), and 54 articles were published between 2011 and 2013. Twenty-four of these articles were published in Nigerian OA Journals, and the remaining articles (100) in foreign journals. Conclusions: OA publishing is becoming popular among researchers at CMUL. This trend has been observed worldwide. Nigerian researchers are advised that while going along with the worldwide trend, they should however, be aware of predatory OA journals and publishers. The criteria for determining predatory OA publishers can be accessed via: www.scholarlyoa.com/publishers.