On the Peripheries of Scholarly Infrastructure: A look at the Journals Using Open Journal Systems

Although there have been calls for scholarly infrastructure to be inclusive, new layers of infrastructure are built without a clear understanding of the breadth of scholarly journals that lie on the peripheries of the existing infrastructure. In the hopes that future infrastructure can take a wider range of journals into account, this paper presents the results of an effort to track the number, location, and rate of publication of journals using Open Journal Systems, an open source manuscript management and publication system built by the Public Knowledge Project. The method employed, which involves a combination of scanning weblogs, scraping webpages, and harvesting metadata, has yielded an estimated 9,828 journals that have collectively published 2,565,300 articles since 1990. These journals are distributed across 136 countries on 6 continents, and, in 2015, around a fifth of the OJS journals were published in low or low-middle income countries, and over a third in upper-middle income countries, suggesting that the majority of OJS journals are on the on the "periphery" of today's global scholarly infrastructure. As infrastructure and services continue to be developed, this paper argues, it is necessary to look to such journal so that the infrastructure that is built can be developed in a way that is truly inclusive of the global nature of scholarship. (Author)