On May 6, 2015, I posted “Percentage of OA articles involving APCs” showing on a subject-by-subject basis the percentage of OA articles in a given subject area that involved APCs (that is, appeared in journals charging APCs, although some articles have waivers).
That post included a full set of 28 topics or non-topics for 2013, sorted from the topic most likely to involve APCs to the one least likely, and a partial list for 2014–because I hadn’t yet finished the project of adding full-2014 numbers to my set of 6,490 journals (in DOAJ as of May 7, 2014, capable of being analyzed by an English-reading person, actually OA and not ruled out for other reasons).
I’ve finished that pass now, and can provide a full table for 2014. (Later this week, I think, there will be an announcement on availability of a combined report on that work–one that goes beyond the weekly postings.)
That table appears below. I should also note, in passing, that the total number of articles in the 6,490 journals went from around 366 thousand in 2013 to nearly 408 thousand in 2014–a growth rate of more than 10%, although some fields show less OA activity in 2014. Note that these numbers still ignore some 2,000 journals that didn’t appear to have any English interface, so they’re probably still 10%-18% too low.
Anyway, here’s the table:
| Subject | %APC |
| Mega | 100% |
| Biology | 80% |
| Computer science | 75% |
| Physics | 72% |
| Engineering | 70% |
| Chemistry | 70% |
| Ecology | 68% |
| Medicine | 65% |
| Other Sciences | 64% |
| Mathematics | 61% |
| Earth Sciences | 54% |
| Agriculture | 54% |
| Zoology | 52% |
| Religion | 51% |
| Psychology | 51% |
| Economics | 46% |
| Technology | 45% |
| Sociology | 44% |
| Miscellany | 40% |
| Media & Communications | 37% |
| Language & Literature | 28% |
| Political Science | 25% |
| Anthropology | 22% |
| Education | 19% |
| Arts & Architecture | 17% |
| Law | 12% |
| Philosophy | 11% |
| Library Science | 4% |
| History | 2% |
Want to encourage this research?
Read this post and respond.
Hi Walt,
what falls under the subject area ‘Mega’ please?
Many thanks for enlightening an oblivious.
christiane
A slightly more detailed definition of each subject appears with its blog post (and, of course, Mega hasn’t appeared yet). In this case, Megajournals are journals that publish in a wide variety of fields and had more than 1,000 articles in one of the measured years. (There are other >1,000-article journals, but they’re narrower and included in some other topic.) The most obvious megajournal, representing about 3/4 of all the articles, is PLoS ONE.
Thanks Walt!