Walt at Random

History includes most aspects of cultural research focused on the past and a number of regional, national and state studies journals. The group includes 136 journals, which published a total of 2,739 articles in 2013 and 3,090 in 2014.

Grades

Table 13.1. Journals and articles by grade

Table 13.1 shows the number of journals and 2013 articles for each grade; free and pay numbers; and average articles per journal. History OA journals are unusual in several ways, among them—on the good side—the lack of any C or Unknown journals and the nearly complete absence of pay journals. As usual, bolded percentages (grades) are percentages of all history journals and articles, while others (free and pay) are percentages of the grade above, and the redundant “Pay” line for A$ is omitted.

History journals are also anomalous in that the APC-charging journals do not publish more articles than the free ones.

There’s a larger than usual percentage of D journals, including these subgroups: C (ceased), eight journals with no articles in 2013; D (dying), four journals with 25 articles; E (erratic), seven journals with 54 articles; N (new), one journal with two articles; S (small), 22 journals with 95 articles.

Article Volume (including all of 2014)

Table 13.2. Journals and articles by date

Table 13.2 Shows the number of free and APC-charging journals that published articles in each year, including all of 2014; how many articles those journals published; and what percentage were in (or were) free journals.

One of the three APC-charging journals didn’t start publishing until 2013, which may explain the tiny decline in free-article percentage. As usual, there are some journals that don’t publish articles in any given year—ten in 2013, for example. In any case, virtually all OA history journals are free, and the field is growing, although it’s still small (and will probably stay that way).

Looked at on a journal-by-journal basis, 73 journals published more articles in 2014 than in 2013; 12 published the same number of articles (including five that stopped publishing in 2012 or before); 51 published fewer. In terms of significant change, 65 (48%) published at least 10% more articles in 2014; 25 (18%) published about the same number of articles; 46 (34%) published at least 10% fewer, including 13 journals that, so far, haven’t published any articles in 2014. Most of those 13 are annuals and may publish 2014 articles later in 2015; one is now flagged as malware, which means I won’t look at it.

Table 13.3. Journals by peak article volume

Table 13.3 shows the number of journals in each size category, 2013 articles for journals in that group, and what percentage are in no-fee journals. Not surprisingly, there are no prolific history journals; perhaps surprisingly, the handful of APC-charging journals are small or sparse, and most articles appear in small and sparse journals.

Fees (APCs)

Table 13.4. Journals and articles by fee range

Table 2.4 shows the number of journals in each fee range and the number of 2013 articles for those journals. Given the tiny number of fee-charging history journals, the table is essentially meaningless, but is included for consistency.

Starting Dates and the Gold Rush

Table 2.5. Starting dates for history OA journals

Table 13.5 shows history OA journals by starting date, including the percentage of journals starting in each date range that currently don’t charge APCs. The sense of a gold rush from 2006-2011 that I find in DOAJ in general isn’t there for history: although the rate of journal creation increased significantly in 2008-2011, only one APC-charging journal was created between 2006 and 2011.

Figure 13.1 shows essentially the same information as Table 2.5 but in graphic form, with markers for the three cases where pay journals did begin.

Figure 13.1. History journals by starting date

Table 13.5. Articles per journal by starting date

Table 13.5 includes only those journals that published at least one article in 2013 and shows, for journals started in each date range, the average articles per journal. There are two obvious points of interest in this table: some of the large and medium journals began more than 20 years ago.

Definitions and notes

See The Open Access Landscape: 1. Background for definitions and notes

If you’re interested in a book-form version of this material (with an additional bonus graph added in each chapter), let me know, either in a comment or by email to waltcrawford at gmail dot com.

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