Walt at Random

Sociology
includes a range of social sciences that didn’t fit elsewhere, including social sciences and gender studies, among others. The group includes 234 journals, which published 7,227 articles in 2013 and 7,886 articles in 2014.

Grades

Table 27.1. Sociology journals and articles by grade

Table 26.1 shows the number of journals and 2013 articles for each grade; free, pay and unknown subsets (there are no C-grade APC-charging journals); and average articles per journal. Boldface percentages are of the whole group; others are of the grade above.

As is typical of most areas, APC-charging journals tend to publish a lot more articles than free journals.

Quite a few journals fall into the D group, including these subgroups: C (probably ceased), 13 journals with three articles; D (dying), three journals with five articles; E (erratic), nine journals with 94 articles; H (hiatus?), nine journals with 223 articles; S (small), 20 journals with 77 articles.

Article Volume (including all of 2014)

Table 27.2. Sociology journals and articles by date

Table 27.2 shows the number of free and APC-charging journals that actually published articles each year, including all of 2014; how many articles those journals published; and what percentage was free. The two journals that probably have APCs but don’t provide them (“unknown”) are omitted—and, additionally, quite a few sociology journals don’t publish articles in any given year.

The percentage of free journals is slightly low for HSS and declining slightly; the percentage of articles in free journals has declined rapidly and is now very low for HSS, although still over half.

OA activity in this area is clearly increasing at a reasonably good rate, although less rapidly than the jump from 2011 to 2012. Looked at on a journal-by-journal basis, 99 journals published more articles in 2014 than in 2013; 28 published the same number (including 13 that didn’t publish articles in either year; 107 published fewer articles in 2014. For significant changes, 87 journals (37%) published at least 10% more articles in 2014; 51 (22%) published roughly the same number; and 96 (41%) published at least 10% fewer articles, including 19 journals that had 2013 articles but no 2014 articles so far.

Table 27.3. Sociology journals by peak article volume

Table 27.3 shows the number of journals in each size category (based on the largest year 2011-2013), 2013 articles for journals in the group, and what percentage doesn’t involve APCs. There are no prolific sociology journals—actually, one journal exceeded the 1,000-article threshold in 2014—and very few large journals. As usual, the percentage of free journals and articles declines as the journal size increases.

Fees (APCs)

Table 27.4 Sociology journals and articles by fee range

Table 27.4 shows the number of journals in each fee range and 2013 articles for those journals. For the full study group, the APC ranges were determined by quartiles—that is, the first %Fee column would have 25% in each cell. Clearly, these journals deviate hugely from that, with only one high-priced journal and nearly half of them in the nominal category. Atypically, journals with nominal APCs publish the bulk of the articles involving APCs, with the priciest journals publishing relatively few articles.

Given the numbers, it’s not surprising that there’s a negative correlation between APC and either peak or 2013 volume, but they’re too weak (-0.17 to -0.20) to be significant.

Starting Dates and the Gold Rush

Table 27.5. Starting dates for sociology OA journals

Table 27.5 shows sociology OA journals by starting date and the percentage of journals started in each period that don’t currently charge APCs. There are no very old sociology OA journals, and there’s very little sense of the gold rush—that is, a rapid increase in APC-charging journals from 2006 through 2011. Sociology OA journals picked up in general starting in 2004 and beyond, but the percentage of APC-charging journals has only increased since 2010. If there’s a gold rush, it’s recent, starting in 2010 and continuing since then.

Figure 27.1 shows essentially the same information as Table 27.5 in graphic form (omitting unknown journals).

Figure 27.1. Sociology journals by starting date

Table 27.6. Sociology articles per journal by starting date

Table 27.6 shows journals that published articles in 2013, how many articles they published and average 2013 articles per journal. There are two distinctly high articles-per-journal averages: the three journals from 1990-91 and the 22 from 2004-05.

In all, OA journals in sociology and related fields tend to have a higher percentage of articles involving APCs than most humanities and social sciences, but the fees are mostly very low.

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.

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