Data and Methods

Open Editors collects publicly available information about the editors and editorial boards of scholarly journals through a technique called webscraping, whereby a script accesses the websites of the publishers to extract the relevant information. The codes (programmed in R) are available at GitHub.

Currently, only journals of the following 26 publishers were taken into account:

• Allied Academies (part of OMICS, is probably predatory)
• American Psychological Association (APA)
• American Society of Chemical Engineers (ASCE)
• BioMedCentral
• Brill
• Cambridge University Press (CUP)
• eLife
• Elsevier
• Emerald
• Frontiers
• Hindawi
• IGI Global
• iMedPub (part of OMICS, is probably predatory)
• Inderscience
• John Benjamins
• Karger
• Longdom (part of OMICS, is probably predatory)
• Multidisciplinary Digital Publishing Institute (MDPI)
• PeerJ
• Pleiades
• Public Library of Science (PLOS)
• Royal Society of Chemistry (RSC)
• SAGE
• Scientific Research Publishing (SCIRP, is probably predatory)
• SciTechnol (part of OMICS, is probably predatory)
• Springer Nature

For more details, please see the paper which outlines the method and data sample with greater precision. It also discusses issues of diversity and intersectionality; of linking the dataset with PIDs (persistent identifiers) such as ORCID and ROR; and of current limitations regarding the scope and coverage of the data.

The whole data dump – two CSV-files of ca. 128 MB – is available at GitHub (in the "Output"-folder and the 2022-subfolder).

Latest Updates

• October 2022: A blog post in LSE Impact of Social Sciences Blog covers Open Editors.
• October 2022: Our paper is published in Research Evaluation.
• February 2022: The data-collection was reiterated. The new dataset, which has ca. 100.000 more observations than the first round of scraping, includes editorial data from journals of four additional publishers (BioMedCentral, eLife, PeerJ, and Springer Nature) now.
• May 2021: Ca. 20.000 data points from five publishers (Allied Academies, iMedPub, Longdom, SCIRP, SciTechnol – four of them belonging to OMICS) comprising ca. 750 journals were put online.
• April 2021: Nature Index reports about Open Editors.
• February 2021: The dataset was put online.
• December 2020: Data were scraped.

Feel Free to Re-Use the Data!

Open Editors is distributed under a Creative Commons-license (CC0). You can re-use the dataset or its codes freely. If you wish to attribute the original data-collection to Open Editors, you could perhaps include the following reference:

If you use the dataset, please let us know (via e-mail) so that we can add a link to your work here!

Supported by ...

This project was made possible through a fellowship ("Freies Wissen") from Wikimedia Deutschland in 2020/21.

In addition, my other side-project OOIR (the Observatory of International Research) kindly provides the webspace for this project. :-)

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