OpenAlex sorts every paper into six open-access states. One, “diamond”, means the journal is fully open and charges the author nothing — 1,577,668 works in 2023. DOAJ asks journals that question directly. Of 167 journals carrying the label in this audit, 79 charge a fee, and the disagreement is 2.4 times more likely when the price is not in dollars or euros.
Of the 167 journals OpenAlex labels diamond in this audit — fully open and free for the author — 79 charge an author fee according to DOAJ, which asks them directly. That is 47.31%.
“62.33% of research is open access” sums five different arrangements. Three of them can cost an author money, one is revocable, and one means only that a manuscript sits in a repository while the published version stays behind a paywall.
Fully open, no author fee — supposedly. 1,577,668 works, up from 5.09% in 2015.
The author-pays kinds. 58.18% of gold works and 41.47% of hybrid ones carry a recorded charge.
Free to read on the publisher’s site with no licence at all. It can be closed again tomorrow and it cannot legally be reused or mined.
One label claims to know something about money. DOAJ asks journals that same question and writes down the answer, with a price and a currency. 348 journals, compared both ways: 258 that say they charge and 90 that say they do not.
79 of 167 journals carrying the label charge an author fee.
Are labelled diamond anyway, out of 258 fee-charging journals audited.
Journals DOAJ says charge nothing that are correctly labelled diamond. The label over-includes rather than under-includes, and that distinction is the difference between a bug and a smear.
OpenAlex records an article charge in US dollars. For a journal that prices in rupiah, rial or hryvnia there is often no dollar figure on file — and a missing price is being read as no price.
Of fee-charging journals priced in dollars, euros and the like that carry the diamond label anyway.
The same measure for every other currency — 2.4 times as likely.
Fee-charging rupiah-priced journals in this sample that are labelled diamond. Indonesia is the country the diamond map puts first.
Read at face value, the country ranking says the places least able to afford an article charge publish overwhelmingly in journals that levy none. It is a good story and this data cannot support it.
Diamond share of 459,858 works — the highest of the sixty countries read here.
Against the Netherlands’ 5.86%. Indonesia’s share is 12.6 times Germany’s.
Also high, and subject to the same caveat. Nothing here says the ranking is wrong — it says the ranking is not measured well enough to read.
This page shows the label is unreliable. It does not show what the true country ranking is, and three specific things would.
The whole mechanism is a null in one field. If OpenAlex carried a converted charge for the journals that price in rupiah and rial, the classification would be right about them and the country map could be read directly.
348 journals is enough to establish the rate and its currency dependence. It is not enough to correct sixty countries one by one. Doing that means auditing every journal each country publishes in, which is a much larger job than a daily API allowance permits.
DOAJ already answers the question directly for 23,402 journals, 62.69% of which charge nothing. Building the country map from that answer rather than from an inferred label would avoid the problem entirely, at the cost of covering only DOAJ-indexed journals.
Four limits, and the first is the one that decides how far the headline travels.
The audit covers 348 journals: 258 that DOAJ records as charging and 90 as not. OpenAlex allows about a thousand requests a day without an account and each journal costs two, so the sample stopped where the allowance did rather than at a planned size. 3 sampled journals were not in OpenAlex at all.
It records what a journal told it, and journals change their fees. Where the two sources disagree this page assumes DOAJ is right because it asked; that assumption is doing real work and is worth stating plainly.
The state is assigned per work but decided by the journal, so a journal labelled wrongly mislabels everything it published. That is why a modest share of journals can move a national percentage a long way.
Charging an author fee is not evidence of a bad journal and charging none is not evidence of a good one. The only claim on this page is that a field which says a journal charges nothing frequently describes a journal that charges something.
Every figure on this page traces to one of these, through a CSV in
data/global-openaccess/. Each is checked against its source query on every
build.
Every indexed scholarly work 2014-2024 grouped by open-access status, by year and by author country; journal records with a converted article processing charge in US dollars — CC0, no key, polite pool with a mailto. The oa_status field is the subject of this page rather than its evidence: a work is labelled diamond when its journal is fully open and no author fee is recorded, and 'no fee recorded' is not the same claim as 'no fee'.
23,402 indexed open-access journals with a direct yes/no answer on whether the journal charges an author fee, plus the amount and the currency — CC BY-SA, no key. DOAJ asks the journal and records what it says, including the currency. It is the closest thing to a direct answer and it is what the audit on this page compares against.
Income group, region and GNI per capita (NY.GNP.PCAP.CD) for each country — No key. Used only to describe the countries, never to compute an open-access figure.
The published definition of the six oa_status values — Cited so the gap between the documented definition and the observed behaviour is checkable rather than asserted.