Open Access Journals in Slovenia: An Exploratory Study

The advent of the Internet in the 1990s fostered the rapid growth of open access publishing, a literature that is digital, online, free of charge, and free of most copyright and licensing restrictions. Although open access publishing is a widely studied topic, there are only a few studies on open access publishing in Slovenia and there are no studies on the publishing practices of the Slovene open access journals. This exploratory study aimed to establish the extent of open access publishing in Slovenia and to explore some of the publishing practices used by the Slovene open access journals. By combining the data from different databases, the total number of Slovene open access journals was estimated to 150–200. The analyses of publishing practices of DOAJ-indexed Slovene open access journals revealed that 70% of these journals exercise peer-review quality control, while only 28% of them use Creative Commons licences. Surprisingly, no Slovene DOAJ-indexed open access journal is charging publications fees.