  This article is a contribution towards an understanding of Open Access (OA)
publishing. It proposes an analysis framework of 18 core attributes, divided
into the areas of Bibliographic information, Activity metrics, Economics,
Accessibility, and Predatory issues of OA journals. The framework has been
employed in a systematic analysis of 30 OA journals in software engineering
(SE) and information systems (IS), which were selected among 386 OA journals in
Computer Science from the Directory of OA Journals. An analysis is performed on
the sample of the journals, to provide an overview of the current situation of
OA journals in the fields of SE and IS. The journals are then compared
between-group, according to the presence of a publication fee. A within-group
analysis is performed on the journals requesting publication charges to
authors, in order to understand what is the value added according to different
price ranges. This article offers several contributions. It presents an
overview of OA definitions and models. It provides an analysis framework born
from the observation of data and the literature. It raises the need to study OA
in the fields of SE and IS while offering a first analysis. Finally, it
provides recommendations to readers of OA journals. This paper highlights
several concerns still threatening OA publishing in the fields of SE and IS.
Among them, it is shown that high publication fees are not sufficiently
justified by the publishers, which often lack transparency and may prevent
authors from adopting OA.
