Volume 14, No 2, 2017
Open Access Health and Medicine Journals An Informative Study
Rabiya Mushtaq, Fayaz Ahmad Loan and Mufazil Ali
Abstract
The main purpose of the study was to analyse various aspects of open access journals in the field of health and medicine registered in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The data were collected from the DOAJ and websites (homepages) of the health and medicine jour nals, in the month of December 2017. The quantitative method was applied for data analysis to reveal the findings. The results reveal that open access journals in the field of health and medicine are increasing at an exponential rate and currently, 636 hea lth and medicine journals are registered in the DOAJ. These journals are published from the seventy five (75) countries by more than two hundred (200) publishers in the twenty six (26) languages of the world. The maximum number of journals is published fro m the United Kingdom (81, 12.74%), by the BioMed Central (44, 6.92%), and in the English language (565, 88.83%). The results also reveal that the majority of the health and medicine journals (396, 62.26%) does n o t charge publication fee and adopt the peer review system (99.84%) to evaluate the articles before publication in the journal. The figures may not represent the actual number of the open access health and medicine journals available online as the scope of the study is restricted to the Directory of Open Access Journal (DOAJ)
Pages: 90-100
Keywords: Health Science; Medicine; Open access; Open access journals