Walt at Random » Blog Archive » The Open Access Landscape: 1. Background

"In early 2015, I completed what I believe to be the closest thing to a universal survey of Open Access (OA) journals, sometimes called Gold OA: all the journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as of May 7, 2014, that had enough English in some version of the interface so that I could evaluate them. That turned out to be 7,301 journals, of which 6,490 journals published at least one article between January 1, 2011 and June 30, 2014 and had websites that made it possible for me to count or estimate the number of articles each year. The analysis and description of the state of OA journals, based on this universe of 6,490 journals, appears in mid-2015 as Idealism and Opportunism: The State of Open Access Journals, an issue of Library Technology Reports from the American Library Association. This series of blog posts (which may turn into a book if there’s enough interest) complements that study by expanding on Chapter 5, 'A Closer Look at Subjects.' If time and energy permit, I plan to prepare a post on each of 27 topics (and two clusters that aren’t really topics) and, possibly, several groups of topics. Each post will discuss the journals on one topic, looking at them in some of the ways that Idealism and Opportunism looks at the broader set of journals. Subjects were assigned based on the very detailed subjects in DOAJ and, in some cases, the title or publication pattern of the journal. This introductory post notes some of the definitions that apply across all of the posts, the one way in which these posts may introduce new data, and some caveats ..."