How many science journals?

• Estimation: <> 25-40,000 journals
• 96% are published online
• 8-10% are published under Open Access models
• 20% of science articles are available free of charge
• How many articles have been published ever (means since 1665)? est. 50 millions
• Growth: 1.4 million of articles per year
• There are 2,000 publishers but Top 3 (Elsevier, Springer, Wiley)  account for 42% of articles published
• Elsevier itself publishes 250,000 articles a year in 2,000 journals
• The biggest platform of ejournals, ScienceDirect, provides 240 million of downloads per year to 10 million of users
• The cost of publishing a single online scientific journal article is estimated at $10,000
• To purchase an article for an individual: $30-40
• Average cost of a subscription for a library: $3,792 (average cost for a chemistry journal) up to $10,000
• The most expensive: Biochimica & Biophysica Acta, $20,930 a year!

Sources:

– http://duncan.hull.name/2010/07/15/fifty-million/

– Article 50 million: an estimate of the number of scholarly articles in existence. Jinha, Arif E. Learned Publishing, Volume 23, Number 3, July 2010 , pp. 258-263

– SOAP Project result: http://www.slideshare.net/ProjectSoap/soapfall2010

– Leggott, Mark. UPEI, Web of Science and Knowledge for all. Posted on: 14th of August 2010.

http://loomware.typepad.com/loomware/2010/08/upei-web-of-science-and-knowledge-for-all.html

 – Björk B-C, Welling P, Laakso M, Majlender P, Hedlund T, et al. (2010) Open Access to the Scientific Journal Literature: Situation 2009. PLoS ONE 5(6): e11273. http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273

– http://bjoern.brembs.net/comment.php?comment.news.608

–  Fanelli D (2010) Do Pressures to Publish Increase Scientists’ Bias? An Empirical Support from US States Data. PLoS ONE 5(4): e10271. http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0010271

– Ware, Mark and Mabe, Michael. The stm report : An overview of scientific and scholarly journals publishing. September 2009. Online: http://www.stm-assoc.org/news.php?id=255&PHPSESSID=3c5575d0663c0e04a4600d7f04afe91f

– http://informationr.net/ir/14-1/paper391.html

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Academic_publishing

– http://bigthink.com/ideas/23100

– http://www.guardian.co.uk/commentisfree/2011/aug/29/academic-publishers-murdoch-socialist

– http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Elsevier