Open Access to Scientific Information: Psychology

In keeping with the general trend, open access (OA) to scholarly and scientific literature has also gained ground and established itself in psychology, albeit via different routes. Purely OA journals remain the exception in psychology. Some 200 journals with psychological content are listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) (as of 1/2015). On the basis of this figure, the share of scholarly OA journals in psychology can be estimated at between five and ten percent. If one applies strict quality criteria, the share is probably considerably smaller. Of the 200 journals with psychological content that are covered by the DOAJ, only about 10 percent have an impact factor (Thomson Reuters) – a metric for the citation frequency of a journal, which, despite all criticism, continues to play an important role in the scientific community. This shows that it is still difficult to find purely OA journals among the psychology journals that – according to traditional criteria – are deemed to be “high-ranking”. However, this may change in the coming years in view of the increasing establishment of OA journals and the emergence of new assessment criteria (keyword: altmetrics).