The Wonderful World of Open Access

I'm one of the editors of an open access journal, but that's not what this post is about. Instead, it's about the wider world of open access, which I've blogged about before, with some charts and stats. The web is full of opinions on open access, with comments from sceptics, advocates and others somewhere in between. I'm really excited by open access publishing, but of course - like any publishing model - it's not perfect. What I've been doing over the past few years is trying to learn a lot more about the world of open access and really understand what the open access landscape looks like. 

In doing so, I've become pretty familiar with where to find information and for this purpose DOAJ is my first port of call. What you find out very quickly is that there are literally thousands of open access journals - about 10,000 - and that they constitute a very diverse, colourful group. One way to demonstrate this is to look at the metadata on the DOAJ website. Here you can find, amongst other things, a list of URLs. So, I took a screenshot of them all - the results of which you can see here (or by clicking the image below - it takes a while to load).

Why on earth did I do this? Partly as a little spare time project to see how easily it could be done but mostly because I wanted a quick way to see what all the websites looked like - i.e. how many are full-blown fancy websites backed by international publishing houses and how many are more small-scale ventures. It also allows you to more easily identify families of open access journals (scroll down and you'll see quite a bit of this). This doesn't necessarily say anything about the quality of journals (that's for readers to decide) but it does provide a visual overview in a more accessible way. Looking through the full list of 10,000 websites would take a little longer! I used a Firefox extension for this task, and it did take quite a while. The DOAJ spreadsheet I used is from late in 2013 so some more recent journals are not included. To finish with, here are some of my favourites...

'Fast Capitalism' - I love the name and the musical intro:

'Studies in Social Justice' - nice cover shot:

'International Journal of Dental Clinics' - so many languages:

'Reading in a Foreign Language' - I just like this idea:

Not sure what caught my eye about this one, but I like it:

A World of Open Access

I've recently been appointed as one of the Editors-in-Chief (with Alex Singleton) of a new Taylor and Francis/Regional Studies Association open access journal. For the two years prior to the launch of Regional Studies, Regional Science I was also heavily involved in the research and development of the journal. As we're about to start publishing papers, I thought I'd blog on the topic of open access more generally and include some interesting data from the Directory of Open Access Journals, the most authoritative source of open access information on the web. Those with an interest in open access will of course know all about DOAJ and the fact that there are now nearly 10,000 open access journals in the world. 9,990 to be exact (as of 26 November 2013).

However, few people have looked closely at the data on open access; probably because most people are still in debate about the merits and pitfalls of open access itself. The simple fact is that open access publishing is having a major impact on academia and the biggest journal in the world (by volume of papers) is now PLoS ONE, an open access title, as documented by several commentators including Heather Morrison at the University of Ottawa. Now for some data and charts...

The United States has over 1,200 open access journals and seven countries account for more than 50% of all open access journals. Journals come from a total of 124 nations (click charts to enlarge):

by country - full size chart

Open access publishing is currently in a major phase of expansion, but it's not new - for example, 22 new titles were launched in 1985. The peak year to date has been 2011 with 1,099 titles being launched:

by year started - full size chart

The vast majority of open access titles do not charge a publication fee (66%) but a substantial minority do (26%), including many of the best known titles:

by publication fee - full size chart

Your knowledge of, and exposure to, open access will vary greatly by discipline. There are over 500 open access titles in Medicine and more than 160 in Political Science but only 3 in Geology (according to DOAJ):

by discipline - full size chart

The majority of open access titles publish only in English (5,538 or 55%), with the next closest language of publication being Spanish (621 or 6%):

by language - full size chart

The data these charts are based on can be downloaded directly in CSV format from the DOAJ FAQ page. Just scroll down and look for the section entitled "How can I get journal metadata from DOAJ?".

There's a lot of activity in the field of open access but it is highly unequal in terms of its geographic, disciplinary and linguistic distribution. In the subject fields of Regional Studies and Regional Science (the subject areas for our new title) the open access landscape is considerably less crowded - particularly in relation to titles supported by major international learned societies and multinational publishing houses. Given this situation, we expect that Regional Studies, Regional Science (already known more commonly as RSRS) will play an important role in helping improve access to knowledge in regional research across a wide range of disciplines, with a focus on geography, planning and economics.

Look out for our first articles in December, by Andrew Beer (Adelaide, Australia) and Terry Clower (North Texas, United States), Sarah Ayres (Bristol, UK), John Gibney (Birmingham, UK) and Markku Sotarauta (Tampere, Finland).