Recalibrating the Scope of Scholarly Publishing: A Modest Step in a Vast Decolonization Process

Abstract

By analyzing 25,671 journals largely absent from journal counts and indexes, this study demonstrates that scholarly communication is more of a global endeavor than is commonly credited. These journals, employing the open source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS), have published 5.8 million items and represent 136 countries, with 79.9 percent publishing in the Global South and 84.2 percent following the OA diamond model (charging neither reader nor author). More than half (54.6 percent) of the journals operate in more than one language, while publishing research in 60 languages (led by English, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese). The journals are distributed across the social sciences (45.9 percent), STEM (40.3 percent), and the humanities (13.8 percent). For all their geographic, linguistic, and disciplinary diversity, the Web of Science indexes 1.2 percent of the journals and Scopus 5.7 percent. On the other hand, Cabells Predatory Reports includes 1.0 percent of the journals, while Beall lists 1.4 percent of them as predatory. A recognition of the expanded scope and scale of scholarly publishing will help ensure that humankind takes full advantage of what is increasingly a global research enterprise.

The voices of medical education scholarship: Describing the published landscape

“…Another important limitation is our reliance on metadata from CrossRef and WoS, which, by definition, represent a subset of the world's literature failing to include many journals that are situated in the Global South 65 . In addition, while these databases are often used in bibliometric research, they are not infallible and may include data errors that we were unable to detect.…”

“…24 While this study expands upon previous efforts by our author team and others to describe a set of core medical education journals, 14,15 Another important limitation is our reliance on metadata from CrossRef and WoS, which, by definition, represent a subset of the world's literature failing to include many journals that are situated in the Global South. 65 In addition, while these databases are often used in bibliometric research, they are not infallible and may include data errors that we were unable to detect. Further, in some cases, citations had missing data, especially in regard to institutional and geographic affiliation.…”

Measuring back: bibliodiversity and the Journal Impact Factor™ brand, a case study of IF-journals included in the 2021 Journal Citations Report™

“…36 To compare in terms of numbers of journals, a study analysing the 25,671 active journals employing the open-source publishing platform Open Journal Systems (OJS) reports a proportion of journals using English as a main language at 50%. 37 This comparison shows the imbalance of English-only journals across the whole journals publishing sector as represented by the WoS, while pointing to a rescaling possibility of the use of languages other than English in scholarly communications. Of course, the use of a lingua franca such as English can be beneficial for reasons of global dissemination.…”

Ranking, reconocimiento y cargos por publicación (APC): criterios priorizados por investigadores del CONICET para elegir dónde publicar

“…Estas disciplinas sociales y humanísticas, entonces, se caracterizan por esas menciones al acceso abierto que son bastante menores en las otras áreas. Esto podríamos relacionarlo con el importante número de revistas de acceso abierto diamante disponibles para las ciencias sociales y humanas en América Latina (Khanna, Ball, Alperin & Willinsky, 2022), frente a una cantidad menor para otras disciplinas en donde incluso las revistas de acceso abierto cobran cada vez más APC (Beigel, Packer, Gallardo & Salatino, 2022).…”