Beyond the oligopoly: Scholarly journal publishing landscapes in Latin America and Europe

Abstract:  Global scholarly publishing is often described as being dominated by international commercial publishers, particularly those indexed in Web of Science and Scopus. However, this perspective overlooks the diversity of journal ecosystems, especially in non-English-speaking countries. This study examines scholarly journal publishing in seven countries across Europe and Latin America – Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Mexico, Poland, and Turkey – using ISSN Center data and national sources. We categorize publishers according to their institutional and organizational characteristics and assess their coverage in WoS, Scopus, and OpenAlex. Our findings show that educational institutions are the dominant publishers in most countries, accounting for over 75% of journals in Colombia and Brazil and over 50% in Mexico, Argentina, and Poland. Finland is an exception, where scientific and professional associations lead (62.0%). Commercial publishers play a minor role, with their highest shares in Turkey (12.1%) and Poland (8.2%). Regarding database coverage, OpenAlex indexes over 50% of journals in most of the covered countries, while WoS and Scopus index only a small fraction. These results challenge the assumption of a globally uniform publishing system and highlight the need for bibliometric research to consider ways to improve the use of data sources and analysis methodologies so that national publishing structures are also included.