Open Access Heatmap 2020

Just as 2016, 2015 and 2014 I produced an Open Access Heatmap 2020. It shows how many Open Access journals are published per country using data provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ).

The heatmap can be found here or embedded some lines below.

I calculated the number of Open Access Journals per country as listed by the DOAJ (this quite trivial data can be downloaded as a CSV file here, it was retrieved from the DOAJ yesterday). Using this CSV file with the online service CartoDB I produced the following heatmap visualizing the number of Open Access Journals per country. Please note that the map is generated by CartoDB and that CartoDB’s terms of use and terms of service apply. Click on a country to see how many Open Access Journals are published there.

The countries publishing most of the Open Access Journals

The countries publishing most of the Open Access Journals in the heatmap 2020 and listed in the DOAJ are:

Country	Number of Open Access Journals 2020
Indonesia	1,641
United Kingdom	1,617
Brazil	1,458
Spain	768
United States	763
Poland	619
Iran, Islamic Republic of	536
Turkey	396
Italy	395
Russian Federation	384

In 2016 the ranking was dominated by Brazil (873), the United Kingdom (754) and the United States of America (675). The following graphic shows the shares of journals from the fifty countries producing the highest output of Open Access Journals.

Number of Open Accces Journals per Country 2020 and share of scientists among 1.000 employees in a country 2018

In addition, I obtained information on the share of scientists among 1.000 employees in a country from the OECD website to enrich the data of the Open Access Heatmap 2020. Unfortunately, this information was only available for a few countries and dates from 2018.

Country	Number of Journals (2020)	Number of researchers per 1.000 employees (2018)
United Kingdom	1617	9.527
Spain	768	7.038
Poland	619	7.196
Italy	395	5.524
Russian Federation	384	5.608
Romania	330	1.990
Germany	264	9.663
Netherlands	233	10.255
France	230	10.883
Korea, Republic of	125	15.326
China	122	2.405
Czechia	113	7.627
Portugal	109	9.471
Norway	102	12.159
Lithuania	80	6.404
Austria	55	11.366
Slovenia	53	9.893
Slovakia	46	6.751
Belgium	44	12.018
Sweden	43	14.777
Finland	37	14.517
Hungary	36	6.813
Greece	35	8.614
Japan	34	9.842
Taiwan, Province of China	32	13.468
Denmark	29	15.652
Estonia	27	7.744
Ireland	16	11.622
Latvia	11	4.098
Luxembourg	3	6.653

The following graph puts the columns of this table into relation and shows the number of Open Access Journals 2020 divided by number of researchers per 1,000 people employed 2018. A high value indicates countries that have a high output of journals with a comparatively low number of scientists. Conversely, a low value indicates countries that have a low output of journals with a relatively high number of scientists.

Limitations

Please note that the Open Access Heatmap 2020 has only illustrative value and of course it is obvious that it needs to be contextualized with other information to allow profound conclusions. Anyone who wants to have more detailled or granualar information is invited to take the data available on the web and to build heatmaps that visualize for instance the number of Open Access articles published per country. Of course it may also be useful to take other indicators into account as consumer price index or expenditures for research.

Although I am very well aware of all these limitations of the Open Access Heatmap 2020 published here unfortunatley I do not have the time to collect the data and build these maps – it is up to the Open Access community to do so if it thinks better maps are needed. Please feel free to use the CSV file and mash it up with other data just as Christian Heise did with the data from 2015.