Walt at Random

Zoology includes veterinary medicine as well as marine biology. The group includes 178 journals, which published 9,581 articles in 2013 and 9,176 in 2014.

Grade

Table 29.1. Zoology journals and articles by grade

Table 29.1 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 whole group; others are of the grade above.

As usual, journals with APCs tend to publish more articles than free journals (except for the anomalous questionable free journal with lots of articles).

The relatively small number of D journals includes these subgroups: C (apparently ceased), six journals with a total of two articles in 2013; D (dying), two journals, 17 articles; E (erratic), four journals, 90 articles; H (hiatus?), four journals, 157 articles; S (small), nine journals, 39 articles.

Article Volume (including all of 2014)

Table 29.2. Zoology journals and articles by date

Table 29.2 shows the number of free and APC-charging journals that actually published articles each year, the number of articles published and the percentage that didn’t involve APCs. “Unknown” journals (those that apparently have, but do not clearly state, APCs) are omitted. There are some journals that don’t publish any articles in any given year.

The percentage of free journals is slightly below average for STEM and has stayed fairly steady; the percentage of free articles is somewhat above average for STEM, and seems to bounce back and forth.

OA activity in zoology does appear to have slowed down since 2012 and, very slightly, since 2013.

On a journal-by-journal basis, 80 journals published more articles in 2014 than in 2013; ten published the same number (including three with no articles in either year); 88 published fewer articles in 2014. Looking at significant changes, 58 (33%) published at least 10% more articles in 2014; 43 (24%) published about the same number; 77 (43%) published at least 10% fewer articles, including a dozen journals with articles in 2013 but none (so far) in 2014.

Table 29.3. Zoology journals by peak article volume

Table 29.3 shows the number of journals in each size category, 2013 articles for those journals and the no-fee percentages. There are no prolific zoology journals, and as usual the free percentages go down as the volume of articles goes up.

Fees (APCs)

Table 29.4. Zoology journals and articles by fee range

Table 29.4 shows how many journals are in each fee range and 2013 articles for each fee range; this table also omits unknown journals. For the full study, fee ranges are based on actual quartiles, so each of the first four %Fee figures should be around 25%. Notably, zoology journals tend to be lower-priced.

There is essentially no correlation between APC level and article count, either peak count or 2013 count: the numbers are 0.01 and 0.03 respectively.

Starting Dates and the Gold Rush

Table 29.5. Starting dates for zoology OA journals

Table 29.5 shows zoology OA journals by starting date and the percentage of journals started in each date range that currently doesn’t charge APCs. The “gold rush” for DOAJ as a whole is a rapid increase in APC-charging journals beginning in 2006 and slowing down after 2011; for zoology, the rapid growth started in 2002-03 and resumed in 2006-11.

Figure 29.1 shows essentially the same information in graphic form, omitting unknown journals.

Figure 29.1. Zoology journals by starting date

Table 29.6. Zoology articles per journal by starting date

Table 29.6 shows journals that published articles in 2013, the number of articles and average articles per journal. It appears that journals founded in 1994-97 publish a lot of articles, with other deviations as well.

Overall, zoology and related topics show fairly typical STEM patterns but a somewhat atypical drop in activity since 2012.

Definitions and notes

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

This completes the series of subject posts based on my study of 6,490-odd journals–but I’ve now completed a much broader study, encompassing essentially all of DOAJ as of early June 2015 and using Google/Chrome translation to make sense of 3,00h0-odd non-English journals (although 20 still couldn’t be handled). The study–The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014–is now available as a PDF ebook and will shortly be out in paperback.

This entry was posted on Friday, September 11th, 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.