The endless life of OA Journals from myth to reality: the survey on present status of vanished OA journals in Iran and future prospect

Abstract

Open access journals in Iran were created in line with the open access movement in the world and their number is increasing day by day. In Iran ROAD is recognized as an important resource for identifying and tracking open access journals for publishers, users and researchers. In monitoring the Iranian open access journals of ROAD database, we recognized that the URL of some of these journals is not active. As we know there is no guarantee for long-term access to open access journals on the web & Iran doesn't have Internet archives, the importance of investigating this issue becomes more. The primary aim of this study for the first time is to explore the phenomenon of vanishing OA journals in Iran on ROAD by tracking all Iranian open access journals in this database in the period from 2010-2020 in all subject area such as social science, applied science, medicine & etc. the journals were sorted by year, and in each year they divided into three categories base on type of publishers: academic publishers, non-academic publishers and self-publishers. After checking the ROAD URLs, if the address is not active, title and URL of the journals were searched in all kinds of search engines and Wayback Machine. Our result shows that the highest percentage of vanished journals belong to the category of self-publishers and non-academic publishers, respectively, and academic journals have the lowest percentage of vanished. Surveys show that between 2010 and 2020, a total of 110 open access journals were vanished, including 38 self-publishers, 25 academic publishers and 47 non-academic publishers.