by Hamid Pashaei and Heather Morrison

Abstract
De Gruyter is a well-known traditional academic publisher with 270 years of experience. We first noted the dramatic expansion of De Gruyter into open access publishing in 2016 (French: Dumais-DesRosiers, M. & Brutus, W. (2016); English: Morrison (2016). In 2014, there were no De Gruyter titles listed in DOAJ; by the end of 2015, De Gruyter was the third largest publisher in DOAJ. In 2019, De Gruyter’s expansion into open access is even more remarkable, primarily through De Gruyter’s new imprint Sciendo, which has added more than 300 OA journals in 2019. The majority of De Gruyter / Sciendo journals (57%) do not charge APCs. In many cases we were not able to ascertain whether or not there is a fee.

Details
Both De Gruyter and Sciendo publish journals through either Open Access or Paid access model.

The analysis of Open Access journals for these two publishers reveal that especially Sciendo is expanding its number of open access journals significantly, as almost 300 new journals were added to their database in 2019 alone.

Out of the new journals, 33 titles were published for the first time in 2019.

A deeper glance into the list of Sciendo journals shows that most of them are published through collaboration with different universities and academic societies and institutions in Europe.

There is not a clear pattern for pricing model of open access journals for authors by Sciendo. About 57 percent of the open access journals published by Sciendo are free of charge to publish in for authors, while almost 14 percent charge processing fees to publish articles. We were unable to find information regarding the rest of the journals.

For the open access journals with article processing charge (APC) model, the range of processing fees was approximately 50 Euros to 1000 Euros, depending on the journals in which the authors want to publish their articles (To write this blog post, we converted the cost from local currencies to Euros).

On the other, there were less changes in De Gruyter open access journals, though we found 21 new journals in the list of their journals comparing to the previous year. The data regarding their publishing model could be seen in the following chart.

For the journals with article processing charge model, the range was almost between 500 to 2000 Euros, with the average cost about 1000 Euros.

On a side note, there were some journals that were transferred between De Gruyter and Sciendo as the publisher, so it could be beneficial to authors and people who are interested in finding journals if De Gruyter was more clear in pointing out this on their website.

References
Dumais-DesRosiers, M. & Brutus, W. (2016). De Gruyter maintenant 3rd éditeur en importance sur le Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Sustaining the Knowledge Commons https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2016/04/27/de-gruyter-maintenant-3e-editeur-en-importance-sur-le-directory-of-open-access-journals-doaj/

Morrison, H. (2016). De Gruyter open (English). Translation of Dumais-DesRosiers, M. & Brutus, W. (2016) De Gruyter maintenant 3rd éditeur en importance sur le Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Sustaining the Knowledge Commons https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2016/04/27/de-gruyter-maintenant-3e-editeur-en-importance-sur-le-directory-of-open-access-journals-doaj/ Sustaining the Knowledge Commons
https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2016/04/27/de-gruyter-open-english/

Cite as:

Pashaei, H., & Morrison, H. (2019). De Gruyter and Sciendo Open Access journals expanding in 2019. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2019/10/16/de-gruyter-and-sciendo-open-access-journals-expanding-in-2019/