Walt at Random

Psychology includes those journals clearly dealing with aspects of psychology and a few borderline cases. The 74 journals published 2,926 articles in 2013 and 3,428 articles in 2014.

Grades

Table 25.1. Psychology journals and articles by grade

Table 25.1 shows the number of journals and 2013 articles for each grade; free, pay and unknown numbers; and average articles per journal. Boldface percentages are of the full set; others are of the grade above. A$ journals are always pay, and this group doesn’t have any free C-grade journals or unknown D-grade. There isn’t the usual case of Pay journals at each grade having considerably higher articles per journal than Free journals, but there’s the huge effect of the two A$ journals—which is really one journal with more than 1,000 articles in 2013 (the other has very few). That single journal is also responsible for nearly all the growth in psychology OA from 2013 to 2014.

D journals include these subgroups: C (probably ceased), one journal with no articles; D (dying?), two journals with 13 articles; E (erratic), four journals with 29 articles; N (new), one journal with no 2013 articles; S (small), seven journals with 31 articles.

Article Volume (including all of 2014)

Table 25.2. Psychology journals and articles by date

Table 25.2 shows the number of free and APC-charging journals (omitting the three journals with unknown APCs) that published articles each year, including all of 2014; how many articles those journals published; and what percentage was free. Journal numbers don’t add up to 71 (that is, 74 minus three unknowns) because there are always journals that don’t publish articles in any given year.

The percentage of no-fee journals is a little low for the humanities and social sciences but still averages eight of ten journals—but the percentage of articles in those free journals, which was just below average for humanities and social sciences in 2011, has dropped sharply to a level that’s nearly as low as biomed.

OA activity in psychology is clearly increasing, at a reasonable clip, but that’s largely due to one journal. On a journal-by-journal basis, it’s a darker picture: 29 journals published more articles in 2014 than in 2013, five published the same number (never zero), and 40 published fewer. Looking at significant changes, 24 journals (32%) published at least 10% more articles in 2014 than in 2013; 17 (23%) stayed about the same; and 33 (45%) published at least 10% fewer articles in 2014.

Table 25.3. Psychology journals and articles by peak article volume

Table 25.3 shows the number of journals in each size bracket that had any journals; 2013 articles for journals in that group; and the no-fee percentages. Psychology is unusual: there are no large journals but there’s one prolific journal, and in all three of the smaller categories, no-fee percentages of journals and articles are nearly the same.

Fees (APCs)

Table 25.4. Psychology journals and articles by fee range

Table 25.4 shows the number of journals in each fee range and 2013 articles for those journals. The first %Fee column would show 25% for the complete study, so relatively fewer psychology journals have high APCs (but those journals publish nearly all of the non-free-journal articles) and relatively more low-fee journals.

As to correlation between APC charged and volume of articles in 2013, it’s tricky: there’s a strong correlation (0.62), but only because the largest journal by far—publishing roughly five times as many articles as all other APC-charging journals combined—also has the highest APC (the only one above $2,000). Remove that journal, and the correlation is -0.26: a negative correlation (suggesting that lower APCs correlate with higher volume) but too low to be significant.

Starting Dates and the Gold Rush

Table 25.5. Starting dates for psychology OA journals

Table 25.5 shows psychology OA journals by starting date and the percentage of journals started in each date range that currently don’t charge APCs. For DOAJ as a whole, there’s a sense of a gold rush of new APC-charging journals from 2006 through 2011, but that’s not really evident here, given that only one journal started in 2008-09 charges fees but most of those started in 2012-13 do.

Figure 25.1 shows essentially the same information as Table 25.5 (omitting unknowns) but as a graph.

Figure 25.1. Psychology OA journals by starting date

Table 26.6. Articles per psychology journal by starting date

Table 26.6 shows journals that published articles in 2013, when they started, and average 2013 articles per journal. Given that the hot spots are the 1980s, 1990-91 and 2010-2011, I think it’s fair to say there are no real patterns here.

Overall, these journals look like social sciences as far as journals are concerned but more like medicine in that articles tend to be published in APC-charging journals—and expensive ones at that.

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 and probably some additional analysis added in each chapter), let me know, either in a comment or by email to waltcrawford at gmail dot com. If you’d like to see this research continued, please contribute to Cites & Insights.

This entry was posted on Friday, August 14th, 2015 at 7:00 am and is filed under open access. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.