Foreign Open Access Journals in the Field of Librarianship: Opportunities for Publishing Research Results

Abstract

Open access journals are widespread, including the field of library science. The purpose of the article is, basing on the results of the analysis of foreign journals on library science topics, to prepare a list of journals for potential publishing Russian scientists’ articles in them.The selection of journals was carried out on the platforms Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Dimensions, Lens.org and Scimago Journal & Country Rank. Non-thematic journals were eliminated from the initial sample of journals; the remained ones were analyzed according to the following parameters: reflection of journal data on major world open access resources, indexing in international databases (Web of Science and Scopus), quartile (Q1  и Q2 from Scimago Journal & Country Rank), as well as open access models, price policy and availability of an open license.In addition, the studied journals were checked for presence/absence in the “black” lists of journals. Based on these data, the general “portrait” of library open access journals was compiled and the list of recommended foreign open access journals for publishing the Russian scientists’ results of research was marked out.The study embraced 220 open access journals.The results indicated the Directory of Open Access Journals (57, 7 %) as the main platform for journal selection. About 64 % of journals were free of charge for authors with publishers (universities or associations) covering the costs of publishing articles themselves. “Diamond” (about 63.5% of journals) and “Green” (about 43, 5 % of journals) were identified as the dominant open access models, indexed in Web of Science and Scopus – about 60 % of open access journals.The study also revealed the problem of correct reflection of open access journals on the platforms (discrepancy of topic, type of the document, etc.). The list of 12 highly rated journals that library scientists could use when searching for information and publishing their research results in the open information space was compiled, and analyzed for publications of Russian authors in them over the past 5 years (2018–2023).