Indexing Open Access Law Journals…or Maybe Not

Abstract

At the 2007 Charleston Conference, Elaine Yontz and Jack Fisher, library science professor and librarian respectively at Valdosta State University, gave a presentation on their study of indexing by the leading information science indexers of the seventy-eight open access journals (OAJ) listed for library and information science in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). They discovered that less than 47% of the journals listed in the DOAJ were indexed. Additional observations made were the relative newness of many of the library science journal titles listed in DOAJ, the breadth of languages in which OAJ were being published, and the quality of many of the publishers or groups behind the journals. Yontz and Fisher are concerned that American scholars overlook these potentially helpful journals because of the lack of indexing.