In a separate thread (Canadian TriAgency OA mandate) a comment stated that "There are actually a multitude of standards, proposals, and norm-setting instruments [for OA] ... and most lower resource countries are clinging to whatever they can get (predatory publishers, crumbs from the APC scholarship table, etc.)." I want to write something akin to 'this needs challenging' (I don't want to be in breach of the house rules so early) but as late as it is here in the UK I can't head off to bed without at least unpacking this depiction for discussion. 

The success of research publishing in LMIC (low- and middle-income countries LMIC or the Global South) is significantly greater than "clinging to whatever they can get (predatory publishers, crumbs from the APC scholarship table, etc)." And while we all know it's not just about numbers, let's use the numbers as a starting point and we can dig further into the subject as we discuss things.

Using PKP's numbers alone (other very good open source software is available but I only have PKP's data to hand which you can find at Harvard Dataverse – https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/OCZNVY) in 2023 there were: 

• 46,270 active journals* on OJS (*active = publish >5 articles in the year);
• publishing a total of 1.71m articles in 2023;
• With 428 book presses publishing 10,894 books/items;
• And 28 servers hosting 3,124 preprints (the biggest being SciELO).

And, if we follow the data research findings on OJS in 2022 (Khanna et al. Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing: A modest step in a vast decolonization process, https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00228) where "... 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model", that would mean 37k journals published 1.35m articles in the Global South in 2023. This is far from the depiction of scraps under the table. 

And, if one were to throw around the 'predatory' label for journals in LMICs, let's follow the same research and see that 1% of all those journals are found in Cabell’s Predatory Reports and 1.4% show up in Beall’s (2021). That is far more than any of us would like, but it is a long long way from 'predatory' being the norm or "clinging to whatever they can get" for scholarly publishing in LMICs.

But as Kent will remind me immediately, these are just numbers. This huge journal and article output, in itself, is not indicative of anything other than an increasing quantity of output, so a better understanding of what underpins these numbers is essential. But it simply cannot be dismissed out of hand.

Quoting Khanna et al (2022), "...they are in 136 countries, with 79.9% in the Global South and 84.2% following the OA diamond model ... journals operate in more than one language (48.3%), with research published in 60 languages (led by English, Indonesian, Spanish, and Portuguese)." I summarised the paper this time last year in the Scholarly Kitchen (http://tinyurl.com/ydbjfuj5).

Mark

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