Scholarly impact of open access journals - Caitlin Rivers

Use the link to access the infographics described in the following blog post: "After I wrote about the apparent decline in interest in open source/access/science, one commenter suggested that search volume may be declining as the concepts become more mainstream. Here are those trends again, without open science to obscure the lower search volume terms.  It’s a classic research conundrum - is the effect we are observing real?  I looked into it more using data specifically on open access and open science. I downloaded a list of open access journals from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). I also downloaded a spreadsheet of 2011 impact data from Journal Metrics, an offshoot of Scopus that assesses journal impact. Journal Metrics provides two impact measures: Source Normalized Impact per Paper (SNIP) and SCImago Journal Rank (SJR). I will mostly be using SNIP score for this analysis.  According to their FAQ, SNIP 'measures a source’s contextual citation impact. It takes into account characteristics of the source's subject field, especially the frequency at which authors cite other papers in their reference lists, the speed at which citation impact matures, and the extent to which the database used in the assessment covers the field’s literature. SNIP is the ratio of a source's average citation count per paper, and the ‘citation potential’ of its subject field. It aims to allow direct comparison of sources in different subject fields.'  All analysis were done in an ipython notebook, and relied heavily on pandas. You can view the notebook here, and regular .py code here. You can also download figures or obtain a doi at figshare.  There are quite a few more analysis available on the ipython notebook (no coding skills necessary, its a webpage). Here is the link again ...  [1] 66% of open access journals do not have fees. Only 28% always have a fee - the rest are conditional (or data on fees are missing). [2] The number of open access journals (OAJ) is steadily increasing. There are 8,597 OA journals according to OAJD, and more are added constantly. It's a strong upward trend.  [3] 55% of open access journals are published in English. Spanish is the second most common language at 6%. [4] A number of journals were started in the 19th century, and some are still published today. Fishery Bulletin, for example, began in 1881 (or 1871, depending on if you believe the website or the DOAJ data) and is still in print. [5]mThere are more proportionally OAJ in the life sciences than in physical and social sciences. Not only that, but the gap is quite large - nearly 15% in life sciences, compared to 7% in the other fields ..."