Received 26 December 2012, online published 17 September 2013 DESIDOC Journal of Library & Information Technology, Vol. 33, No. 5, September 2013, pp. 405-411  2013, DESIDOC Analysis of Open Access Scholarly Journals in Media & Communication Shabahat Husain* and Mohammad Nazim** *Dept. of Library & Information Science, Aligarh Muslim University, Aligarh-202 002 E-mail: shabahat12@rediffmail.com **Faculty of Law, Banaras Hindu University, Varanasi-221 005 E-mail: nazim76@gmail.com AbStrACt The paper gives an account of the origin and development of the Open Access Initiative and explains the concept of open access publishing. It also highlight various facets related to the open access scholarly publishing in the feld of Media & Communication on the basis of data collected from the most authoritative online directory of open access journals, i.e., Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). The DOAJ covers 8492 open access journals of which 106 journals are listed under the subject heading ‘Media & Communication’. Most of the open access journals in Media & Communication were started during late 1990s and are being published from 34 different countries on 6 continents in 13 different languages. More than 80 % open access journals are being published by the not-for-proft sector such as academic institutions and universities. Keywords: Open access journals, open access initiative, directory of open access journals, DOAJ, OAI media and communication 1. intrOduCtiOn Scholarly communication is often used interchangeably with the term scholarly publishing. Scholarly communication is the process of academics, scholars and researchers sharing and publishing their research findings so that they are available to the wider academic community (such as university academics) and beyond 1 . It includes both the dissemination and access to scholarship and research in a variety of formats and states of completion, such as published books or journal articles, research results and data sets, and drafts of papers 2 . Research is basically funded by public. But a publically-funded research is not allowed for the public. They have to pay for it again. Scientists disseminate the results of their research through journals. The traditional system of publishing provides an obstacle in the dissemination of research findings due to its pricing policies. Dwindling budgets, and high cost of journals are making libraries unable to purchase a good number of journals. In the present scenario, libraries are cutting the subscription of journals. Internet has changed the traditional scholarly publishing system and a new system of scholarly discourse has emerged, i.e., open access (OA) publishing system, which promises to give extreme advantages to the researchers, educational institutions, and libraries, particularly, those which have acute shortage of resources for purchasing scholarly literature. The OA movement has gained substantial popularity in developed countries and many developing countries are also taking interest in this movement. This movement is supported by different bodies such as Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition (SPARC), Open Access Initiative (OAI), Open Society Institute (OSI), Public Library of Science (PLoS), etc. With the three important declarations, i.e., Budapest, Bethesda, and Berlin, this movement has gained momentum since 2003 3 . 2. COnCEPt OF OPEn ACCESS By open access, one means the free and immediate availability on the public internet of those works which scholars give to the world without expectation of payment-permitting any user to read, download, copy, distribute, print, search or link to the full-text of these articles, crawl them for indexing, pass them as data to software or use them for any other lawful purpose 4 . The goal of the OA movement is to make scholarly literature freely available in digital form worldwide with minimal restrictions in their use. The present study is an attempt to identify the trends of