Update December 2019: for the most current percentage of non-charging journals, use the DOAJ Advanced Search, limit to journals, then expand the Article Processing Charges tab. As of December 16, 2019, the ratio of the 14,079 journals in DOAJ that are non-charging can be determined from the following result:

64% of the journals added to DOAJ after March 2014 do not have article processing charges, while 36% have article processing charges. As of today, the total is 1,123 journals of which 720 do not have article processing charges (based on an ISSN count of journals with no charges supplied by DOAJ) and 403 have charges (from the DOAJ website / advanced search / journals / expand article processing charges). However, this does support the statement that two-thirds of fully open access journals do not have article processing charges.

The difference between the 26% with charges and 5% with conditional charges we found last year (total 31%) and this sub-sample could reflect differences in the samples and should not be considered indicative of a trend. This sub-set of journals includes journals recently added to DOAJ and journals that have gone through the DOAJ re-application process (only a minority of journals have done this, less than 12% the last time I checked). It is possible that journals with conditional charges, or old-fashioned print-based base page charges rather than OA APCs, would be less likely to fill out the new DOAJ form which forces a choice between Yes or No to article processing charges.

The text file supplied by DOAJ staff has been posted to the OA APCs dataverse. The number of journals was calculated using a simple ISSN using the Excel find and replace function. If anyone with a bit of programming skill would like to take the text file and transform it into .csv (or other spreadsheet – manipulable file), that would be helpful. The SKC team may well get around to this, just not sure where this will fit in our priority list.

This post is part of the open access article processing charges project.

Cite as:

Morrison, H. (2015). Two-thirds of DOAJ journals do not have article processing charges. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/25/two-thirds-of-doaj-journals-do-not-have-article-processing-charges/