GRAY OA 2012-2016: OPEN ACCESS JOURNALS BEYOND DOAJ

"Comprehensive answers to those questions may not be feasible, for a variety of reasons, but this report should get a lot closer to the full picture—by adding “gray OA”: gold OA journals that are not in DOAJ. (This does not include journals dropped from DOAJ in mid-2016: those were covered in the earlier report.) Herewith, then, some oversimplified figures for gray OA, offered comparably to those on page 1 of GOAJ:  Gray OA journals published 155,347 articles in the first half of 2016. Full-year figures include 296,963 articles in 2015; 255,183 in 2014; 188,645 in 2013; and 125,039 in 2012. Extrapolating for 2016, this shows decreasing rate of growth in each year.  In all, 7,743 gray OA journals published at least one article between January 1, 2012 and June 30, 2016, so you could say there were an average of 20 articles per journal in 2015—but that’s misleading.  There are a staggering 18,910 journal titles in the gray OA world as defined for this report—but most of those titles were never anything more than titles and template-generated webpages.  Among the 6,841 journal clearly stating charges, 6,374 (93%) do charge author-side charges (henceforth APC), and those journals published 96.7% of the 2015 articles—up slightly from 96.5% in 2014. (There are another 902 journals that apparently charge but don’t state the charges; including those journals, no-APC journals accounted for only 2.9% of 2015 articles and 3.1% of 2014 articles, with APC-charging journals accounting for 97.1$ and 96.9% respectively.) In short, nearly all of gray OA involves APCs.  Including only journals that actually published articles in a given year or half-year, and excluding failed-to-state journals, 4,631 journals published 139,327 articles in the first half of 2016, taking in a maximum of $46,418,625 in APCs—or $333 per article ($343 excluding articles in no-fee journals). That’s an average of 30 articles per journal, which extrapolates to 60 for the full year. For 2015, the comparable numbers are 5,252 journals with articles; 262,398 articles; $81,130,347 maximum APCs; $309 average cost per article ($320 excluding no-fee journals); and 50 articles per journal...."