Open Access Journals: A Study

Abstract

Open access journals are scholarly journals that are available to the reader “without financial or other barrier other than access to the internet itself.” Some are subsidized, and some require payment on behalf of the author. Subsidized journals are financed by an academic institution or a government information center; those requiring payment are typically financed by money made available to researchers for the purpose from a public or private funding agency, as part of a research grant. There have also been several modifications of open access journals that have considerably different natures: hybrid open access journals and delayed open access journals. Open access journals (sometimes called the “gold road to open access”) are one of the two general methods for providing open access. The other one (sometimes called the “green road”) is self-archiving in a repository. The publisher of an open Access journal is known as an open access publisher, and the process, open access publishing. The paper describes about the open access and open access journals. The benefits of the OAJ to researchers, for education, types of OAJ, the OAJ and the library, essential of OAJ, advantages and disadvantages of OAJ, current problems, criticism, history and links are discussed in this paper for the benefit of the research scholars.