Journal portals – an important infrastructure for non-commercial scholarly open access publishing
| DOI | https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2016-0088 |
| Pages | 643-654 |
| Date | 11 September 2017 |
| Published date | 11 September 2017 |
| Author | Bo-Christer Björk |
| Subject Matter | Library & information science,Information behaviour & retrieval,Collection building & management,Bibliometrics,Databases,Information & knowledge management,Information & communications technology,Internet,Records management & preservation,Document management |
Journal portals –an important
infrastructure for non-commercial
scholarly open access publishing
Bo-Christer Björk
Department of Management and Organisation, Hanken School of Economics,
Helsinki, Finland
Abstract
Purpose –The purpose of this paper is to look at third party journal portals, which facilitate the low-cost
publishing of open access journals. Portals have become very important enablers for converting journals
published by scholarly societies and universities to open access, in particular in the social sciences
and humanities.
Design/methodology/approach –Portals were identified using a combination of methods including a
literature search, interviews with experts, a key word web search and by analyzing web addresses and
publishers in data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).
Findings –In total, 21 portals fitting our definition were identified. Together these published more than 6,000
journals. They contribute around 10 percent of the journals indexed in the DOAJ, and the content is very
highly skewed to certain countries, in particular Latin America and Asia.
Originality/value –While there have been earlier case study reports about individual portals, especially
SciElo, this is probably the first systematic study of this phenomenon as a whole.
Keywords Portal, Open access, SciELO, Scholarly journal
Paper type Research paper
Introduction
Globally there are probably more than 20,000 Open Access journals claiming that they are
scholarly and peer reviewed. Around 9,000 such journals are indexed in the Directory of
Open Access Journals (DOAJ), but many, especially small journals published outside North
America and Western Europe, often published in other languages than English, are not.
In addition, there are around 10,000 journal of dubious quality published by so-called
predatory publishers (Shen and Björk, 2015). These are nowadays excluded from inclusion
in the DOAJ. The variation between journals is enormous, ranging from small journals in the
humanities producing one issue per year, to the Megajournal PLOS ONE, with over 30,000
articles per year. In terms of quality the journals range from the predatory publisher
journals which publish anything for paying customers, to journals like eLife and Nucleic
Acids Research, which are leading journals in their respective fields, even compared to
traditional subscription journals.
There are many different ways in which the journals can be split into groups. A common
one is whether a journal charges authors or not. The majority of DOAJ indexed journals do
not in fact (Morrison et al., 2015). And for those journals that charge authors, the price range
is from as low as 9 USD to 4,000 USD (Solomon and Björk, 2012). Another one is whether the
journal has been open access from the start or has converted from a print subscription
journal (sometimes continuing to sell the print version, while the e-version is made OA).
The country of the publisher, publishing language and scientific fields are also obvious
criteria for classifying journals. A very important facet is the type of publisher: commercial
publisher, scientific society, university or university department, individual scientist/group Online Information Review
Vol. 41 No. 5, 2017
pp. 643-654
© Emerald PublishingLimited
1468-4527
DOI 10.1108/OIR-03-2016-0088
Received 16 March 2016
Revised 11 November 2016
7 March 2017
Accepted 14 March 2017
The current issue and full text archive of this journal is available on Emerald Insight at:
www.emeraldinsight.com/1468-4527.htm
The second anonymous reviewer provided very constructive comments and suggestions, which helped
improve the manuscript. ElHassan ElSabry provided useful additional information about J-Stage.
643
Journal portals
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