Is Open Science a Developed Countries’ Phenomenon? A Case Study of Journals Registered in the DOAJ

Abstract

The open science movement is a significant development recently that promotes equality, accessibility, and transparency in research. The program aims to improve the quality and significance of research while increasing public access to science. The open science movement advocates for free and open science using various means. This novel idea has gained focus since its conception during the last decade. Open access to scholarly content is a prerequisite to excelling in research. Open access to research through scholarly journals is a subset of open science. This paper is an attempt to analyze journals listed on the Directory of Open Access (DOAJ) repository. The study observed that there is growth in open access journals globally. However, most of the journals are from the high-income group of developed countries. This is because high-income nations with superior facilities and infrastructure benefited from a variety of incentives to publish in open access journals or various modes of open access. So, it can be argued that open science is a developed countries’ phenomenon. Middle and lower-middle groups of countries should encourage various forms of open science, including the open access of scholarly content through scholarly publications. Further insight into the scholarly publication patterns, including subject coverage, citation analysis, and author-level collaboration analysis, will yield a better and more holistic picture of the phenomenon.