An analysis of the current overlay journals

Research data to accommodate the article "Overlay journals: a study of the current landscape" (https://doi.org/10.1177/09610006221125208)

Identifying the sample of overlay journals was an explorative process (occurring during April 2021 to February 2022). The sample of investigated overlay journals were identified by using the websites of Episciences.org (2021), Scholastica (2021), Free Journal Network (2021), Open Journals (2021), PubPub (2022), and Wikipedia (2021). In total, this study identified 34 overlay journals. Please see the paper for more details about the excluded journal types.

The journal ISSN numbers, manuscript source repositories, first overlay volumes, article volumes, publication languages, peer-review type, licence for published articles, author costs, publisher types, submission policy, and preprint availability policy were observed by inspecting journal editorial policies and submission guidelines found from journal websites. The overlay journals’ ISSN numbers were identified by examining journal websites and cross-checking this information with the Ulrich’s periodicals database (Ulrichsweb, 2021). Journals that published review reports, either with reviewers’ names or anonymously, were classified as operating with open peer-review. Publisher types defined by Laakso and Björk (2013) were used to categorise the findings concerning the publishers. If the journal website did not include publisher information, the editorial board was interpreted to publish the journal.

The Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) field of science classification was used to categorise the journals into different domains of science. The journals’ primary OECD field of sciences were defined by the authors through examining the journal websites.

Whether the journals were indexed in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus, or Clarivate Analytics’ Web of Science Core collection’s journal master list was examined by searching the services with journal ISSN numbers and journal titles.

The identified overlay journals were examined from the viewpoint of both qualitative and quantitative journal metrics. The qualitative metrics comprised the Nordic expert panel rankings of scientific journals, namely the Finnish Publication Forum, the Danish Bibliometric Research Indicator and the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers. Searches were conducted from the web portals of the above services with both ISSN numbers and journal titles. Clarivate Analytics’ Journal Citation Reports database was searched with the use of both ISSN numbers and journal titles to identify whether the journals had a Journal Citation Indicator (JCI), Two-Year Impact Factor (IF) and an Impact Factor ranking (IF rank). The examined Journal Impact Factors and Impact Factor rankings were for the year 2020 (as released in 2021).