Directory of Open Access Journals with Special Reference to Agriculture: A Study

Abstract

The research papers can be easily accessed from the publisher website by the different scientific
community. Furthermore, this accessibility can be done through the journal subscription paid by
individual/institutions or open access. In order to get more citations and updating knowledge on a particular
research field, the accessibility of the paper by researchers in the same field is playing an important role.
However, it is not possible to provide the accessibility of all journals available in the same research area to
the scientists due to huge money spent on subscription fees and also constraints use of limited library funds.
Recently, the open accessed paper introduced by many journals to overcome this subscription barrier to the
user group and provides easy accessibility. This study explores the research output in the field of agriculture
as reflected from the directory of open access journals available on the worldwide web. This paper
investigates to find out the year wise output, topmost categories (subject, journals, country) and peer review
in the research. The worldwide web analysis has also been taken up to identify the research output of
agriculture of Directory of Open Access Journals available. The present study analyzes the data collected
using string "agriculture" in DOAJ database for the period 2003-2018. Results show that “Agriculture
(General)” was ranked first for subject wise documents with records of 59 journals and 21177 articles.
Indonesia have ranked first based on maximum journals published in the agricultural field. Out of 173
journals, Sciendo group has published the highest number of journals. The maximum percentage of the
reviewing process was found for double-blind peer review (45.09 %).