ABSTRACTThis paper examines the characteristics of 462 open access (OA) journals being published in India under the green, gold and hybrid models. The sample of journals was selected from DOAJ, IndianJournal.com and Open J‐Gate. Journal characteristics were measured in terms of growth, subjects, publishers, and citations under each model. While characteristics such as growth, subject, and publisher have been identified by exploring the journal's website only, the citation count of these journals has been calculated by using Google Scholar and the Indian Citation Index. The gold road is now the most popular form of OA publishing in the subcontinent. There is a great variation in the size of OA journals and in their publishers. One publisher has more than 77 journals, but 264 publishers publish a single journal only. Overall, the OA journal landscape is greatly influenced by a few key publishers and journals. While 43% of journals charge publication fees and the fees vary from as low as US$10 to as high as US$400, the highest impact factor of the gold OA journals has been noted as 0.58. The data presented here suggest that publication fees are not a major barrier to authorship within the fields of computer science, pharmacy, and medicine.