Open Access E-books in Islam: A Case Study of Directory of Open Access Books

The present study aims to explore the currents trends of open access e-books available through the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) in the subject field of Islam. The DOAB was selected as a source for data collection during July 2020. The findings reveal that 263 e-books are available on Islam, which contributes only (0.94 percent) of the total share of e-books (27,697) available in DOAB. The results reveal that the maximum number of e-books is available on Religion (111), History (42), Sociology (34), and Political Science (27). The publishing trends show that majority of these e-books were published by Transcript Verlag (28), followed by Pressess de I'ifpo (23) and Brill (18), respectively. The licensing authority reveals that the highest number of e-books (105) on Islam is available through Open Education License for Books.The linguistic assessment shows that (44.86 percent) of e-books have been published in the English language followed by French (38.78 percent) and German (12.92 percent), respectively. The majority of these books (28.51 percent) are published before 2000. In contrast, authorship trends reveal that majority of the e-books are by a single author (68.87 percent) followed by two authors (20.53 percent) and three authors (9.50 percent). The maximum number of e-books (24.71 percent) has 201-400 pages while as, (51.33 percent) of e-books do not have page numbering.