Do open-access journals in library and information science have any scholarly impact? A bibliometric study of selected open-access journals using Google Scholar

Using 17 fully open-access journals published uninterruptedly during 2000 to 2004 in the field of library and information science, the present study investigates the impact of these open-access journals in terms of quantity of articles published, subject distribution of the articles, synchronous and diachronous impact factor, immediacy index, and journalsʹ and authorsʹ self-citation. The results indicate that during this 5-year publication period, there are as many as 1,636 articles published by these journals. At the same time, the articles have received a total of 8,591 Web citations during a 7-year citation period. Eight of 17 journals have received more than 100 citations. First Monday received the highest number of citations; however, the average number of citations per article was the highest in D-Lib Magazine. The value of the synchronous impact factor varies from 0.6989 to 1.0014 during 2002 to 2005, and the diachronous impact factor varies from 1.472 to 2.487 during 2000 to 2004. The range of the immediacy index varies between 0.0714 and 1.395. D-Lib Magazine has an immediacy index value above 0.5 in all the years whereas the immediacy index value varies from year to year for the other journals. When the citations of sample articles were analyzed according to source, it was found that 40.32% of the citations came from full-text articles, followed by 33.35% from journal articles. The percentage of journalsʹ self-citation was only 6.04%.