A Quantitative Analysis of the Open Access Business and Economics Journals

The main purpose of the paper is to study the publishing trends of the open access business and economics journals available in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The online survey was conducted for collection of data and quantitative method was applied for data analysis. The data were collected from the December 10-20, 2013 about more than six hundred business and economic journals and later presented in tabular forms to reveal the findings in accordance with desired objectives. The findings show that 607 business and economics journals are listed in the DOAJ and are published from the 67 countries of the world. The maximum number of journals (88, 14.50%) is published from Brazil, and during the first decade (2001-2010) of the 21st century (382, 62.93%). The linguistic assessment shows that the open access business and economics journals are mostly monolingual (405, 66.72%) and the majority of these are published in English language (498, 82.04%). The results also reveal that the majority of the business and economics journals (415, 68.37%) doesn’t charge publication fees to authors whereas almost one-fourth (147, 24.22%) of the journals demand article processing charges. The study does not explore the whole World Wide Web, but only the DOAJ and therefore, figures do not represent the actual number of the open access business and economics journals available online. The study is very beneficial for the business and economics scientists, academicians, researchers, information experts and open access advocates across the globe.


INTRODUCTION
In the present knowledge based society, all the countries of the world spend a good portion of their budget on research. The major regions of the world have reserved a fixed percentage of their Gross Domestic Product (GDP) on research & development (R&D) activities. The GDP of the world in 2013 was 85,751 billion US dollars and global spending on R&D 1,558 billion US dollars measuring 1.8% of the total GDP in which Americas spent 2.4%, Asia 1.9%, Europe 1.9% and rest of the world 0.9%. The top ten countries as per the expenditure on R&D are given as under (Battelle 2013   The journals are considered as the best vehicles in the scholarly information transfer cycle. However, the increasing cost of journals and shrinking library budgets make are the biggest barriers between journal and researcher as the subscription prices of scholarly journals have been increasing at a rate faster than the inflation rate for several decades (Dingley 2005 (2008)  (2040) of journals accepted author processing charges whereas 71% (5063) didn't demand such charges. The author processing charges were highly demanded by journals published from Africa (60%) followed by North America (44%) and minimum by journals published from South America (7%). Solomon and Bjork (2011) also reported that 26% of the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals charged author processing charges (APCs) whereas 74% didn't charge any publication fee to the authors. In the recent study, Loan (2014) revealed that the maximum number of journals (567)  languages. The present study will be a step forward to study the open access scholarly journals in business and economics disciplines.

PROBLEM STATEMENT
The business and economics disciplines play very crucial role in the national as well as global developments be it social, political, or economic. Business is the nucleus of a nation's development whereas economics is an engine of financial growth and stability. However, information is the life blood of these institutions to formulate plans and policies and implement in a timely manner and fix targets and Hence, the present study will examine the availability of the scholarly information in open access mode.

PURPOSE OF THE STUDY
The main purpose of the paper is to study the publishing

SCOPE AND LIMITATIONS OF THE STUDY
The study is limited only to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and therefore, figures doesn't represent the actual number of open access business and economics journals, but journals listed in the DOAJ. Hence the findings shouldn't be generalised.

METHODOLOGY
The quantitative method of research was conducted to complete the study. In quantitative method of research numerical data are collected (data in the form of numbers) and analysed using mathematical/statistical methods. In the present study, the data was collected about more than six hundred journals from the DOAJ which provides information about country, subject, language(s), publisher, author processing charges and many other features. The DOAJ was accessed from December 10-20, 2013 to collect data. An excel file of the collected data was created, and data were analysed using mathematical formulae. Data were later presented in tabular forms to show findings in accordance with desired objectives.

Subject-wise information
As on date the DOAJ lists 10027 journals covering more than 100 subject areas in which 607 (

Period-wise information
In  (Table 3). The findings show that after the more journals have been published in business and economics after the Budapest Open Access Initiative.

Language-wise information
The linguistic assessment of the journals shows that 66.72 percent of journals (405) are monolingual, 24.88 percent (151) bilingual, and 7.08 percent (43) trilingual whereas four (4) journals are published in four and five languages each (Table 5). Chinese and Ukrainian are other prominent languages ( Table 6). The linguistic analysis depicts that open access business and economics journals are published in all the influential languages of the world.

Total Languages = (25)
Note: Journals were multi-lingual and hence percentage and total will vary

Publication fee-wise information
The present study depicts that the majority of the business and economics journals (415, 68.37%) doesn't charge publication fees to authors whereas 24.22% percent of journals (147) require the payment of fees (Table 7). Fee-based open access journals require payment on behalf of the author. The author can pay the fee from his own income or approach his employer or institution for the same. However, in cases of economic hardship, many journals waive all or part of the fee. The open access movement is crossing the linguistic barriers as well and information is published in all the most influential world languages. However, it is a matter of concern that not a single open access journal is published in Hindi in the fields of business and economics. Indian journals are mostly monolingual and published almost exclusively in English language. The need is to take efforts to publish their Hindi versions as well for the Indian citizens. The other countries need to adopt the same policy to publish information in their national languages. However, English language should be adopted by all journals for the dissemination of information at the international level.
There are three basic sources of revenue to which a publisher can turn: (1) authors, (2) readers, and (3)