Adoption of Creative Commons Licences for the Maximum Utilisation of e-Resource: A Use Case of Open Access Journals Indexed in DOAJ

The present study aims to investigate the trend and growth of Open Access (OA) journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) portal. The authors found that there are 17,379 indexed journals in 80 languages from 130 countries covering all fields of science, technology, medicine, social sciences, arts, and humanities. The study presents findings on the contribution to DOAJ by subjects, country, DOAJ seal, article processing charges (APC), and author publishing rights. The study found that medicine journals were highest in this portal and the majority of contributions came from Indonesia. It was also found that the majority of the journals allow the author to hold publishing rights and only 8% of OA journals received the DOAJ seal. The maximum numbers of OA journals have Creative Commons Attribution licences and the highest APC is Rs. 3,97,985. DOAJ is the main source of information in facilitating organized access to OA literature. It is recommended to raise a DOAJ special seal for practicing extra high-level commitment to OA publications