How many journals are there

Peer Review Process Articles often reviewed by an author's peers before publication. No peer review process. No peer review process, may be reviewed by an editor or editorial board.

Access Mainly held in libraries or on subscription-based databases - few are freely available on the WWW. Mainly held in libraries or on subscription-based databases. Many titles available from major newsagents, public libraries and some university libraries.

Available in supermarkets and newsagents. Available in newsagents. Examples American Economic Review. Eighty-eight of the journals were affiliated with a scholarly society or a research institution. The analysis also identified journals that are still online but seem to have stopped publishing papers, so might be vulnerable to vanishing in the near future. The study lays out a "compelling case" for the vulnerability of online journals, says Elizabeth Lightfoot, a librarian at Florida International University in Miami.

Journals can disappear from the Internet for a number of reasons, says Laakso. Journals are supposed to be preserved in digital archives when this happens. LOCKSS works by making multiple copies of content that is stored on the servers of participating libraries, who pay an annual fee to have their collections preserved. These vary in cost and coverage: Some work with libraries, others with publishers — services such as PKP PN are free for journals that sign up.

Tens of thousands of titles are currently curated in such preservation schemes. But, Laakso says, there are dozens of journals that fall through the cracks. Radical open-access plan could spell end to journal subscriptions. Pinning down whether a journal is truly unavailable online is a challenge, because there is no single database that tracks the activity of open-access journals, says Lisa Matthias, one of the authors of the study and a PhD student at the Free University of Berlin.

To find out how many journals had vanished, the team manually collected historical data from several lists of titles, including the DOAJ, Ulrichsweb and Scopus. Then they checked to see if any of the titles they identified were listed on the Keepers Registry, which keeps track of journals that are enrolled into digital preservation schemes.

The majority of the vanished journals had disappeared within 5 years of becoming inactive — the point at which they stopped publishing papers. Around one-third of them disappeared within one year of the last publication.

Subscription journals were not included in the study, Laakso says, because paywalls mean that they would have had to have used a different method to collect the data. There are a lot of scientific papers out there. One estimate puts the count at 1. Who actually reads those papers? According to one study , not many people: half of academic papers are read only by their authors and journal editors, the study's authors write.

But not all academics accept that they have an audience of three. There's a heated dispute around academic readership and citation—enough that there have been studies about reading studies going back for more than two decades.