Maddi Abdelghani, Maisonobe Marion, Boukacem-Zeghmouri Chérifa
Sorbonne Université, CNRS, Groupe d'Étude des Méthodes de l'Analyse Sociologique de la Sorbonne, GEMASS, F-75017 Paris, France.
Laboratoire Géographie-cités, CNRS, Université Paris 1, Université Paris Cité, EHESS, Aubervilliers, France.
PLoS One. 2025 Apr 14;20(4):e0320347. doi: 10.1371/journal.pone.0320347. eCollection 2025.
This study aims to compare the geographical and disciplinary coverage of OA journals in three databases: OpenAlex, Scopus and the Web of Science (WoS). We used the Directory of Open Access Scholarly Resources (ROAD), provided by the ISSN International Centre, as a reference to identify OA active journals (as of May 2024). Among the 62,701 active OA journals listed in ROAD, the WoS indexes 6,157 journals, Scopus indexes 7,351, while OpenAlex indexes 34,217. A striking observation is the presence of 24,976 OA journals exclusively in OpenAlex, whereas only 182 journals are exclusively present in the WoS and 373 in Scopus. The geographical analysis focuses on two levels: continents and countries. As for disciplinary comparison, we use the ten disciplinary levels of the ROAD database. Moreover, our findings reveal a similarity in OA journal coverage between the WoS and Scopus. However, while OpenAlex offers better inclusivity and indexing, it is not without biases. The WoS and Scopus predictably favor journals from Europe, North America and Oceania. Although OpenAlex presents a much more balanced indexing, certain regions and countries remain relatively underrepresented. Typically, Africa is proportionally as under-represented in OpenAlex as it is in Scopus, and some emerging countries are proportionally less represented in OpenAlex than in the WoS and Scopus. These results underscore a marked similarity in OA journal indexing between WoS and Scopus, while OpenAlex aligns more closely with the distribution observed in the ROAD database, although it also exhibits some representational biases.
本研究旨在比较三个数据库(OpenAlex、Scopus和科学网(WoS))中开放获取期刊的地理和学科覆盖范围。我们使用国际标准连续出版物编号(ISSN)国际中心提供的开放获取学术资源目录(ROAD)作为参考,以识别开放获取活跃期刊(截至2024年5月)。在ROAD列出的62701种活跃开放获取期刊中,WoS收录了6157种期刊,Scopus收录了7351种,而OpenAlex收录了34217种。一个显著的观察结果是,仅在OpenAlex中有24976种开放获取期刊,而仅在WoS中有182种期刊,在Scopus中有373种。地理分析集中在两个层面:大洲和国家。至于学科比较,我们使用ROAD数据库的十个学科层面。此外,我们的研究结果揭示了WoS和Scopus在开放获取期刊覆盖方面的相似性。然而,虽然OpenAlex提供了更好的包容性和索引,但也并非没有偏差。不出所料,WoS和Scopus更青睐来自欧洲、北美和大洋洲的期刊。尽管OpenAlex的索引更加平衡,但某些地区和国家的代表性仍然相对不足。通常,非洲在OpenAlex中的代表性与在Scopus中一样低,一些新兴国家在OpenAlex中的代表性按比例低于在WoS和Scopus中的情况。这些结果强调了WoS和Scopus在开放获取期刊索引方面的显著相似性,而OpenAlex与ROAD数据库中观察到的分布更为接近,尽管它也存在一些代表性偏差。