The advent of the Internet and Web 2.0 (for what it’s worth) has stimulated a movement for open information sharing and has heralded the migration from subscription-based paper publications to their more accessible–and free–digital counterparts. Notable by-products of this change include sites such as Wikipedia, NCBI Bookshelf, and the Johns Hopkins OpenCourseWare. Traditional academic journals have also begun to embrace this culture of open exchange, with a rapidly growing list of open access peer-reviewed publications on the Internet. Some journals opt to make their archived articles freely available a certain period after publication.

At the First Nordic Conference on Scholarly Communication in 2002, there was the idea to catalog the thousands of open access journals available online with the aim to “increase the visibility and ease of use of open access scientific and scholarly journals thereby promoting their increased usage and impact”. This has since resulted in the creation of the Directory of Open Access Journals, maintained by the Lund University Libraries.

The directory covers a wide range of subects, ranging from agriculture and food sciences to history and archaeology. As of this post, there are 4227 journals in their database. These include 310 medicine journals, 126 public health journals, and 28 nursing journals. These numbers do not include the 160 biology, 33 biochemistry, and 27 biotechnology journals.

I applaud the efforts of both the DOAJ and open access journals in fostering information exchange, but for now, I still find myself relying on subscription-based [online] journals by necessity. While many high-impact medical journals provide some free content, they reserve the bulk of their articles for paying users. Thankfully, I have access to these articles via institution-wide subscriptions; otherwise, I may find myself more frequently seeking open access journals.