Open Access Journals in Agriculture and Allied Sciences: A Study based on Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)

This paper attempts to do a quantitative analysis of open access journals in the field of agriculture and allied sciences indexed by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) which indexes over 17,200 peer-reviewed open access journals covering all branches of knowledge published by 130 countries in 80 languages. The study revealed that out of 17,282 open access journals indexed by the DOAJ (as on 31.12.2021), 458 journals (2.65%) are publishing articles related to agriculture and allied sciences. Brazil and Indonesia are the top countries publishing higher number of OA journals in agriculture and allied sciences with 74 titles each (16.16%) followed United Kingdom with 26 titles (5.68%), Out of 458 journals, 179 journals (39.08%) are published in English language. About 62.28% (285 journals) are published in monolingual followed by bilingual (124 journals; 7.07%), trilingual (44 journals; 9.61%), quadrilingual (3 journals; 0.65%) and each journal in pentalingual and multilingual. Creative Common licensing is followed by 447 (97.60%) journals. While 230 journals (50.22%) permit the authors to hold complete copyright 228 journals (49.78%) restrict the same. Double blind peer review is followed by 243 journals (53.06%) and ‘Blind peer review’ by 115 journals (25.11%). While 272 journals (59.39%) don’t collect article processing charges (APC) from the authors, 186 journals (40.61%) collect APC. Most of the journal publishers i.e. 119 (25.98%) take 9-12 weeks for publication and 3 journals take more than 52 weeks for the same. The study revealed that 164 OA journals (35.81%) provide access to below 100 articles and only one journal provide access to more than 5000 articles