Coverage of DOAJ journals' citations through OpenCitations

Citations are the pillar of academia. All scientific studies naturally refer to other works. The study aims to reveal the coverage, in terms of citations, of the open access journals in DOAJ according to the data available in OpenCitations. In addition, the study presents the quantitative status of the references between these sources and points out the trend of availability in the years. We obtained the input data of our study from DOAJ and OpenCitations platforms by downloading the public data dump of DOAJ articles and the OpenCitations' COCI. In order to improve efficiency and avoid the long search time, we downloaded the entire dataset directly instead of using the API. We filtered these two large datasets by using Python Programming Language and several libraries. In the final step we carried out a visualization of the output data. We analyzed the coverage of articles in terms of open access journals in DOAJ according to the data available in OpenCitations. DOAJ journals receive around 36 million citations and do approximately 113 million citations. 10.5 million of these citations involve articles published in open access journals as both citing and cited entities. Observing the change in the citations over the years, it can be easily stated that there has been a remarkable increase trend in the last 20 years. In order to improve the quality of scholarly communication, the data related to citations must be open and accessible by everyone. DOAJ and OpenCitations are important infrastructures that provide citation data openly. By revealing the coverage of Open Access journals in the above-mentioned organizations and presenting the yearly trend of involved citations in DOAJ we may draw attention to the importance of independent OA infrastructure in academic publishing, and may provide important aspects on why scientific studies should be open