The data in this set was culled from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), the Proquest database Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA), and a sample of peer reviewed scholarly journals in the field of Library Science.

The data include journals that are open access, which was first defined by the Budapest Open Access Initiative: 

By ‘open access’ to [scholarly] literature, we mean its free availability on the public internet, permitting any users to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search, or link to the full texts of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software, or use them for any other lawful purpose, without financial, legal, or technical barriers other than those inseparable from gaining access to the internet itself.

Starting with a batch of 377 journals, we focused our dataset to include journals that met the following criteria: 1) peer-reviewed 2) written in English or abstracted in English, 3) actively published at the time of analysis, and 4) scoped to librarianship. The dataset presents an overview of the landscape of open access scholarly publishing in the LIS field during a very specific time period, spring and summer of 2023.

After scoping 377 journals, we examined 134 that met our criteria and determined that the state of open access is clearly an evolving trend, where journals are moving toward ‘open,’ but with varying levels of transparency. Ascertaining the openness of individual peer reviewed journals was challenging because the info had to be scraped from individual websites. Overall, the field of librarianship is beginning to embrace openness in their journals.

Description of the data and file structure

Data Collection

In the spring of 2023, the researchers gathered 377 scholarly journals whose content covers the work of librarians, archivists, and affiliated information professionals. This data encompassed 221 journals from LISA, widely regarded as an authoritative database in the field of librarianship. From the DOAJ, we included 144 LIS journals. We also included 12 other journals not indexed in DOAJ or LISA, based on the researchers’ knowledge of existing OA library journals. 

The data is separated into several different sets representing the different indices and journals we searched.

The first set of journals, entitled LISA journals, was obtained from the database LISA. The following fields are in this dataset:

• Journal: title of the journal
• Publisher: title of the publishing company

• Publisher Type: distinguishes between different types of publishers: association; independent; university, library, or archive, 

• Country of publication: country where the journal is published
• Region: identifies the continent where the journals are published
• Open Data Policy: lists whether an open data exists and what the policy is
• Open Data Notes: Details about the open data policy
• Open ranking: details whether the journal is diamond, gold, and/or green
• Open peer review: specifies if the journal does open peer review
• Author retains copyright: explains copyright policy
• APCs: Details whether there is an article processing charge
• In DOAJ: details whether the journal is also published in the Directory of Open Access Journals

The second set of journals, entitled DOAJ journals, includes similar information, but it includes the titles of journals listed in the DOAJ.

• Journal: states the title of the journal
• Publisher: title of the publishing company
• Publisher Type: distinguishes between different types of publishers: association; independent; university, library, or archive, 
• Country: country where the journal is published
• Region: identifies the continent where the journals are published
• Open Data Policy: lists whether an open data policy exists
• Open Data Notes: Details about the open data policy
• OA since: lists when the journal became open access
• Open ranking: details whether the journal is diamond, gold, and/or green
• Open peer review: specifies if the journal does open peer review
• Author Holds Copyright without Restriction: lists 
• APC: Details whether there is an article processing charge
• Type of CC: lists the Creative Commons license applied to the journal articles
• In LISA: details whether the journal is also published in the Library and Information Science Abstracts database

A third dataset of journals, titled Additional Journals, includes twelve scholarly, peer reviewed journals focused on Library and Information Science but not included in the DOAJ or LISA.

• Journal: the title of the journal
• Publisher: title of the publishing company
• Publisher Type: distinguishes between different types of publishers: association; independent; university, library, or archive, 
• Country: country where the journal is published
• Open Data Policy: lists whether an open data exists
• Open Data Notes: Details about the open data policy
• Open ranking: details whether the journal is diamond, gold, and/or green
• Open peer review: specifies if the journal does open peer review
• Author Retains Copyright: lists whether the author of an article in the journals retain their copyright upon publication of the article 
• APC: Details whether there is an article processing charge
• CC Licensing: lists which Creative Commons license the journal uses
• Current: lists whether the journal is currently in publication at the time of research and writing
• In LISA: details whether the journal is also published in the Library and Information Science Abstracts database
• In DOAJ: this column lists whether the journal is indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals

A fourth dataset, titled All the Evaluated Journals, includes the titles of all the journals we evaluated and scoped for their open access publication potential.

• Journals: the title of the journal
• Found in DOAJ and LISA: shows which journals appeared in both the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Proquest database Library and Information Science Abstracts (LISA)

Data Processing

The researchers downloaded an Excel file from the publisher Proquest that listed the 221 journals included in LISA. From the DOAJ, the researchers searched and scoped to build an initial list. Thus, 144 journals were identified after limiting search results to English-language only journals and those whose scope fell under the following DOAJ search terms: librar* (to cover library, libraries, librarian, librarians, librarianship). Journals also needed to have been categorized within the DOAJ subject heading “Bibliography. Library science. Information resources. And for the journals that we analyzed that were in either index, those journals were included based on the researchers’ knowledge of current scholarly, peer-reviewed journals that would count toward tenure at their own university, an R1 university.

Once the journals were identified, the researchers divided up the journals amongst each other and scoped them for the following criteria: 1) peer-reviewed 2) written in English or abstracted in English, 3) actively published at the time of analysis, and 4) scoped to librarianship. 

The end result was 134 journals that the researchers then explored on their individual websites to identify the following items: open data policies, open access publication options, country of origin, publisher, and peer review process. The researchers also looked for article processing costs, type of Creative Commons licensing (open licenses that allow users to redistribute and sometimes remix intellectual property), and whether the journals were included in either the DOAJ and/or LISA index.

References:
Budapest Open Access Initiative. (2002) http://www.soros.org/openaccess/

Sharing/Access information

Data was derived from the following sources:

• https://doaj.org/
• https://about.proquest.com/en/products-services/lisa-set-c/
• www.google.com