Gold Route Open Access Journals in Engineering and Technology: Analysis of Research Impact and Implications for Scholarly Communication

Abstract The study examined the research impact of gold open access (OA) journals in engineering and technology. A total of 37 gold route journals that request article processing charges (APC) and 66 other OA journals without APC in the field were found in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and used for the study. The publishers, APC charges and the year each journal was added to DOAJ were identified and included in this study  An informetric approach was used to extract research impact indicators (citations, paper productivity, cite/paper, cite/journal and h-index) of journals. Findings revealed that the publishers of the APC journals were dominated by commercial publishing companies producing over 60% of the journals. Article processing charges ranged from 7.6 USD to 3471.5 USD while the average article processing charges for APC journals was 727 USD. Gold route open access (APC) journals performed better than open access non-APC OA journals since they produced 51.2% of the papers, 71.8% of the total citations and 65.1% of the total h-index. However, findings showed a weak positive correlation between articles processing charges (APC) of the gold route journals and their research impact; while there is high significant positive correlation between research impact of gold route (APC journals) and non-APC open access journals.