How open access diamond journals comply with industry standards exemplified by Plan S technical requirements

Abstract:  Purpose: This study investigated how well current open access (OA) diamond journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and a survey conform to Plan S requirements, including licenses, peer review, author copyright, unique article identifiers, digital archiving, and machine-readable licenses. Method: Data obtained from DOAJ journals and surveyed journals from mid-June to mid-July 2020 were analyzed for a variety of Plan S requirements. The results were presented using descriptive statistics. Results: Out of 1,465 journals that answered, 1,137 (77.0%) reported compliance with the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) principles. The peer review types used by OA diamond journals were double-blind (6,339), blind (2,070), peer review (not otherwise specified, 1,879), open peer review (42), and editorial review (118) out of 10,449 DOAJ journals. An author copyright retention policy was adopted by 5,090 out of 10,448 OA diamond journals (48.7%) in DOAJ. Of the unique article identifiers, 5,702 (54.6%) were digital object identifiers, 58 (0.6%) were handles, and 14 (0.1%) were uniform resource names, while 4,675 (44.7%) used none. Out of 1,619 surveyed journals, the archiving solutions were national libraries (n=170, 10.5%), Portico (n=67, 4.1%), PubMed Central (n=15, 0.9%), PKP PN (n=91, 5.6%), LOCKSS (n=136, 8.4%), CLOCKSS (n=87, 5.4%), the National Computing Center for Higher Education (n=6, 0.3%), others (n=69, 4.3%), no policy (n=855, 52.8%), and no reply (n=123, 7.6%). Article-level metadata deposition was done by 8,145 out of 10,449 OA diamond journals (78.0%) in DOAJ. Conclusion: OA diamond journals’ compliance with industry standards exemplified by the Plan S technical requirements was insufficient, except for the peer review type.