This article examines the evolution of a collection of open access journals (OAJs,) indexed by the Science Citation Index (SCI; Thomson Scientific Philadelphia, PA) against four validity criteria including a free, immediate, full and constant access policy for at least 5 years. Few journals are found to be wrongly identified as OAJ or to have a dubious access policy. Some delayed journals evolved into gold OA; however, these are scarce compared to the number of journals that withdrew from gold OA to be an embargoed or a partially OAJ. A majority of the journals meet three of the criteria as they provide free and immediate access to their entire contents. Although a lot are found to follow a constant policy, a large number has an OA lifetime shorter than 5 years, due to the high frequency of newly launched or newly converted journals. That is the major factor affecting the validity of the collection. Only half of the collection meets all the requirements.

No abstract

No abstract

No abstract

By their widespread availability and dissemination through open access media, scholarly outputs witness an improved visibility supposed to cause a better citation performance. However, due to the existence of the Matthew effect in science system, which affects users' perceptions of quality, ultimate effects of the enhanced visibility on different entities are obscure. Moreover, different attitudes towards open access give rise to a more strong quality dynamics in the open access world. Aiming to explore the consequence of the interaction between visibility and quality dynamics, this study investigates countries positioning in open access journals. The results show that the world's countries welcome open access pattern whether by submitting to or publishing open access journals. A large proportion of the enduring, prestigious open access journals are published by scientifically proficient and developing nations, emphasizing their successful commitment to maintain the undertaken role. The results of the citation analysis highlight national inequalities regarding citation distributions among countries contributing to the journals within the system and within individual disciplines in the system. Well-performing countries mainly consist of advanced ones; however, some lessdeveloped nations are found to perform well in the journal system.