The present analytical study has investigated to identify the research
trends of open access scholarly journals showed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). It gives open access to publishing in the areaof Nephrology based on the data extracted from DOAJ. Open-access scholarly journals are freely available peer-reviewed publications which will permit the user community to search, read, copy, download, share, print, and link to the full-text research articles through the Internet. Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) was launched in 2003 at Lund University, Sweden with 300 OA Journals but today contains ca. 10000 OA Journals including Science, Technology, Medicine, Social Science and Humanities. The DOAJ has three types of membership such as Publisher, Ordinary member and Sponsor (https://doaj.org/about). It is noted that the directory till 5th August 2018 has listed 3,175,734 articles under 11,760 journals across 128 countries, of which 26 (0.22%) journals have been listed under the subject of Nephrology. The results reveal that the huge numbers (57.69%) of the OA Journals in DOAJ are accessible in online or electronic format. A major proportion of 14 journals do not charge any type of article processing charges (APCs). It was found that the major proportion (=34.62%) of journal license was by two licenses namely CC
By-NC-ND and CC By-NC respectively. Majority of journals published
from Switzerland (5 journals), and followed by four journals are published from the United Kingdom. As expected, the major proportion i.e. 73.09% of journals was in the English language of the total open access scholarly journals in the subject of Nephrology. Major frequency of 7 (26.90%) journals is quarterly and followed by frequency of six (23.10%) journals is yearly appeared.

Keywords: Scientometrics; DOAJ; OA; Nephrology; Open access
journals; Scholarly journals.