Scholarly Open Access Veterinary and Animal Science Journals indexed in the DOAJ: A Bibliometric Analysis

The objective of this study is to report the outcome of the bibliometric analysis of Open Access (OA) journals in veterinary and animal sciences (VAS) indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).The DOAJ which indexed 16,460 open access journals as on 10 June 2021, contains 335 open access veterinary and animal science journals (2.03%) and provides access to 1,63,500 articles which is about 2.63% of the total articles. Two journals were indexed in 2003 and the highest number of journals i.e. 46 (13.73%) were added during 2018. The 335 OA journals are contributed by 63 countries and the United Kingdom is the top country with 41 journals (12.24% followed by Indonesia with 35 journals (10.44%).Further, the results indicated that 223 journals are monolingual (66.57%) followed by 81 bilingual (24.17%), 25 trilingual (7.46%), 3 quadrilingual (0.90%) and 3 journals are quintilingual (0.90%). English is the predominant language with 291 journals followed by 55 Spanish, 40 Portuguese and 26 Indonesian. Article processing charge (APC) is not collected by 172 OA journals (51.34%) while 163 journals (48.66%) are collecting APC. Majority of the journals (46.01%) collect APC in US Dollars. Persistent identifier is provided by 243 journals (72.54%) for the resource while 92 journals (27.46%) do not provide PID. The DOAJ seal is awarded to 38 journals (11.34%) and the remaining 297 journals (88.66%) have not been awarded DOAJ seal so far. Majority of the journals (33.43%) contains below 100 articles and only three journals contains more than 5000 articles each