Open Access Journals in Philosophy
How many open access philosophy journals are there? Take a guess.
What did you guess?
OK…
Here’s how many open access journals there are: it depends, but probably more than you thought.
According to the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), there are 293.
But we can filter the answers a bit more, and include only open access philosophy journals that make use of double-anonymous peer-review. The number is then 228.
We can narrow things down a bit more to include only journals that include English among the languages they accept submissions in. That takes us down to 178.
We can also filter out journals that charge fees. That brings the number to 170. You can browse through that list here, and play around with the filters.
If you’re involved with an open access philosophy journal that’s not included in the directory, you can submit an application here.
Worthwhile project Justin — though I wonder if a more informative datum is what proportion of research in philosophy is open access. Arrangements like those between UK universities and publishers mean that a significant portion of published philosophy articles are open access despite not being published in journals that are open access. Counting the number of open access journals is thus likely to underestimate the proportion of philosophy research that’s open access. Perhaps a quick and dirty search of articles published over (say) the past few years, aiming to discern how many are open access, could cue us in to just how common open access is in in philosophy?
Here are the percentages of regular articles (i.e. not Special Issue contributions or Distinguished Lectures) published in the Canadian Journal of Philosophy that are Open Access: in 2020’s issue, 15%; in 2021, 63%; in 2022 (the most recently completed issue), 72%. We are on track to being de facto almost entirely OA even though we probably wouldn’t count as an “Open Access Journal” under many definitions. This is almost all due to the “read and publish” arrangements to which Professor Cholbi refers. They’re really making a difference.
I’m compiling a list of DOA journals in philosophy (with brief intro about each journal). The doc is editable & it is a work in progress. Feel free to contribute!
https://docs.google.com/document/d/1yodDo3ydHOATrwhbgc8R58ivv-vakoYCF4pJg8RNjO4/edit
Bookmarked! Thanks!