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Journal portals – an important infrastructure for non-commercial scholarly open access publishing

Bo-Christer Björk (Department of Management and Organisation, Hanken School of Economics, Helsinki, Finland)

Online Information Review

ISSN: 1468-4527

Article publication date: 11 September 2017

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Abstract

Purpose

The purpose of this paper is to look at third party journal portals, which facilitate the low-cost publishing of open access journals. Portals have become very important enablers for converting journals published by scholarly societies and universities to open access, in particular in the social sciences and humanities.

Design/methodology/approach

Portals were identified using a combination of methods including a literature search, interviews with experts, a key word web search and by analyzing web addresses and publishers in data from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

Findings

In total, 21 portals fitting our definition were identified. Together these published more than 6,000 journals. They contribute around 10 percent of the journals indexed in the DOAJ, and the content is very highly skewed to certain countries, in particular Latin America and Asia.

Originality/value

While there have been earlier case study reports about individual portals, especially SciElo, this is probably the first systematic study of this phenomenon as a whole.

Keywords

Acknowledgements

The second anonymous reviewer provided very constructive comments and suggestions, which helped improve the manuscript. ElHassan ElSabry provided useful additional information about J-Stage.

Citation

Björk, B.-C. (2017), "Journal portals – an important infrastructure for non-commercial scholarly open access publishing", Online Information Review, Vol. 41 No. 5, pp. 643-654. https://doi.org/10.1108/OIR-03-2016-0088

Publisher

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Emerald Publishing Limited

Copyright © 2017, Emerald Publishing Limited

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