A Label Said These Journals Were Free. Half Of Them Charge.

When someone writes a science paper, a journal prints it.

Some journals make the reader pay. Some make the writer pay. And a few charge nobody at all.

That last kind has a name. People call it diamond.

A big database called OpenAlex puts a diamond label on those journals. It labelled 1,577,668 papers that way in 2023.

There is also a group called DOAJ. They just ask each journal: do you charge the writer? Then they write down the answer.

So I took 348 journals and checked one list against the other.

The Label Was Wrong A Lot

Of the 167 journals with the diamond label, 79 of them do charge the writer.

That is close to half.

One of them charges three thousand five hundred and eighty pounds.

Why It Goes Wrong

OpenAlex keeps the price in dollars.

Lots of journals do not price in dollars. They price in rupiah, or rial, or hryvnia.

For those, OpenAlex often has no dollar price at all. The box is empty.

And an empty box is being read as a zero.

You can see it in the numbers. When the price is in dollars or euros, 21.14 per cent of paying journals get the wrong label.

When it is in anything else, 50.6 per cent do.

That is 2.4 times as often.

The Good News First

I want to be fair to the label here.

I also checked 90 journals that DOAJ says are really free.

88 of them got the diamond label. So the label almost never misses a truly free journal.

It just lets in a lot of journals that should not be there.

This Breaks A Nice Story

If you trust the label, it says something lovely. It says the countries with the least money publish the most in journals that charge nothing.

Indonesia comes first, at 63.61 per cent. Germany is at 5.03 per cent. That is 12.6 times as much.

But look at what I found. Of the 46 paying journals in my sample that price in Indonesian rupiah, 21 carry the diamond label.

So the map might be showing which countries use dollars. Not which countries charge.

I am not saying the nice story is false. I am saying this data cannot tell you.

There Is A Better Question To Ask

DOAJ does not guess. It asks.

It says 14,670 of 23,402 journals charge the writer nothing. That is 62.69 per cent.

That number came from asking. It is the one I would use.

Three Things I Cannot Tell You

This is 348 journals, not all of them. OpenAlex only lets you ask about a thousand things a day without an account, and each journal costs two questions. I stopped when the day ran out.

DOAJ can be wrong too. It writes down what a journal told it, and journals change their prices. When the two disagree I trusted DOAJ, because DOAJ asked.

And none of this is about whether a journal is good. Charging money does not make a journal bad. I only checked whether a box that says "free" is telling the truth.