Over 20% of the world's scholarly journals now open access! (Kudos to DOAJ)

Update May 13: the current Ulrich's total for academic, refereed, active journals is just over 27,000, which makes the DOAJ 5,000 only 18.5%, not over 20% of the world's journals as measured by Ulrich's. It is likely that both Ulrich's and DOAJ seriously underrepresent academic journals in China. Thanks to Stian Haklev for the figures.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has just announced a list of milestones, including exceeding 5,000 journals. This is more than 20% of the world's scholarly peer reviewed journals, estimated at ~ 23,000 according to Ulrich's.

This is a conservative estimate. DOAJ is doing great work, but they are a small group, and kvetches from the open access community tend to center around the lag time it takes for new or converted journals to get through the DOAJ vetting process and be included in DOAJ.

If this is a concern for you - ask whether your local library, library consortia, or vendor who benefits from OA journals - is a member or supporter of DOAJ. As the notice points out, this support would be helpful to DOAJ to increase the services that people want of this popular site.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Directory of Open Access Journals Growth 2005-2008

The following charts illustrate the Dramatic Growth of the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) over the past few years. In brief, from December 31, 2005 to December 31, 2008, the number of titles in DOAJ jumped from just under 2,000 to over 3,800 (almost doubled in 3 years). The increase in searchable content is even more remarkable, though! The number of journals searchable at article level more than doubled, from under 500 to over 1,300. The number of articles retrievable through these journals tripled, from about 80,000 to about 240,000. Plus, as the following charts illustrate, not only did DOAJ grow dramatically from 2005 - 2008; the growth rate also grew dramatically, by every measure examined.













This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

Growing Canadian membership in DOAJ!

The list of Canadian members of the Directory of Open Access Journals is growing! As of today, there are 7 Canadian individual library members, 1 Canadian library consortium, and at least 1 individual member that I know of.

Here are the Canadian members as of today:

* Bibliothèque de l'Université Laval
* McGill University Library
* Privy Council Office
* Simon Fraser University Library
* University of British Columbia Library
* University of Saskatchewan Library
* University of Toronto Scarborough

Consortial member: OCUL - Ontario Council of University Libraries.

For in-depth reasons on why libraries should become DOAJ members, see my article in the January 2008 Charleston Advisor. Update: since this article was written in 2007, DOAJ has increased by more than one thousand journals; more many journals are searchable at article level, and new features such as journal lists by country have been added.

Another way to calculate the value of DOAJ membership for your library: analyze the costs of dealing with suggestions from faculty, students, and librarians to add these high-quality open access journals to your collection. If you have your own title list, you can figure out how much work it is to do this on your own. If you don't have a way of handling these suggestions, there is still a cost involved. These queries must be addressed; if you have no way of including these journals in your title lists, reference librarians will be looking them up, over and over, one at a time.

DOAJ membership is definitely an Essential Efficiency in these troubled economic times.

Less than 10% of Open Access journals in psychology charge a publication fee

A Directory of Open Access Journals DOAJ For Authors Search reveals that, in the field of psychology, less than 10% of open access journals charge a publication fee.

Here is the data, effective March 2, 2008:

DOAJ For Authors search: Psychology - All (March 2, 2008)
103 journals total
84 Open Access (82%)
19 Hybrid (18%)
73 No Publication Fee 71% (all of these are open access)
27 Publication Fee 26% (19 are Hybrid, 8 are open access)
8 of the 84 journals in this category (under 10%) charge a publication fee

According to Ulrich's, there are 832 active, refereed, academic / scholarly journals with a subject of Psychology.

84 fully open access journals listed in DOAJ means that the fully OA component of psychology publishing is 10%.

Please note that due to the Dramatic Growth of Open Access, figures for open access are likely to change (grow). If you are reading this post even a few weeks after March 2, 2008, please check the most current numbers in DOAJ.