Introduction

University journals (UJs), journals explicitly affiliated with higher education institutions (HEIs) or their departments, represent a distinctive and under-explored layer of the scholarly publishing ecosystem despite having been around for a long time. While learned societies created and operated the first scholarly journals in the seventeenth century (Fyfe et al., 2017), the rise of research universities inspired by the Humboldtian model in the nineteenth century – first in Germany and later adopted globally – led to the emergence of journals published by university presses. Some of the world’s oldest academic publishers, Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, have existed since the sixteenth century but primarily focused on book publishing until the late nineteenth century. Since the early days and with the move into the era of digital, often open access (OA) publishing (Crawford, 2025), UJs have become a sprawling segment of the modern journal publishing landscape. However, despite long-standing knowledge that UJs make up a substantial share of all scholarly journals (Morrison, 2016; Rosenbaum, 2017; Taşkın et al., 2025b), there has been relatively little research attention aimed directly at UJs.

In the current scholarly communication landscape, UJs are published by a variety of entities and units within HEIs, such as university presses, libraries (Furlough, 2008; Sisättö et al., 2012), academic departments, schools, etc. The fact that publishing activities happen at different levels of the organization is one reason for why properly identifying and studying UJs has been challenging, since the bibliometric publisher information is often not harmonized and connected to the top-level of the organization. Universities themselves might also not be aware of what is happening within their walls since the activities can be decentralized and decoupled (see e.g. Moore & Wigdorowitz, 2025). The more thorough look at previous research later in this paper reveals that bibliometric studies have had very little methodological harmonization into what publisher type classifications to implement, a step which is usually done manually and with varying categories and criteria, which means that numbers and research on UJs varies a lot from study to study making any kind of cumulative knowledge building or longitudinal studies based on previous studies very hard to realize. This lack of harmonization is compounded by the structural biases of selective databases, which disproportionately privilege commercial publishers and English-language journals, thereby obscuring much of the diversity in scholarly publishing (Cruz Romero et al., 2025; Van Bellen et al., 2025).

Outside of a small number of large university presses that function on the volume and business logics of international for-profit publishers, the vast majority of UJs commonly operate with limited resources, on a non-profit basis, and with the mission to support disciplinary communities, foster regionally grounded scholarship, and democratize knowledge production – particularly in underrepresented linguistic, geographic, or disciplinary contexts (Khanna et al., 2022; Laakso & Multas, 2023; Nazarovets, 2025a).

Although the majority of UJs operate as small, mission-driven outlets, the segment is not uniformly peripheral. For instance, UJs are present in the higher categories of various international and national journal evaluation systems, such as the Academic Journal Guide (AJG) and the ABDC Journal Quality List used in business and economics, the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, Series and Publishers, the Finnish JUFO Classification, and Qualis in Brazil. This indicates that universities as publishers can support publications at all levels of quality.

UJs can function as core instruments of knowledge dissemination and as symbolic capital, or “currency of prestige”, for universities (Repiso, 2019; Risam, 2024). UJs frequently act as representations of a university’s academic brand. The capacity to sustain journals that are indexed in international databases is progressively regarded as an indicator of institutional quality and competitiveness in global rankings (Repiso et al., 2019).

The growing interest in non-commercial models of publishing, with a trend towards joint funding and community-based management of scholarly communication, such as Diamond OA, has opened up new opportunities that are in line with the mission of UJs (Armengou et al., 2023; Bosman et al., 2021).

Despite their contributions to national research infrastructures and their alignment with the principles of bibliodiversity and structural equity, UJs remain largely overlooked in global research assessment systems and bibliographic databases (Khanna et al., 2022; Laakso & Pölönen, 2023). This dynamic is reinforced by evaluation cultures in some fields that privilege extremely narrow journal hierarchies, such as the “top five” phenomenon documented by Heckman and Moktan (2020) in economics. UJs marginalization is rooted in a complex interplay of structural and infrastructural challenges. These include the uneven degree of institutional support and formal integration into national research systems (Grötschel, 2017; Nazarovets, 2024); low visibility in selective global indexing platforms (Nazarovets, 2024; Repiso et al., 2019); and inconsistent metadata quality, which hinders large-scale identification, analysis, and comparison of UJs (Nazarovets, 2025b; Nishikawa-Pacher, 2022). Moreover, concerns regarding editorial inbreeding and endogamy persist (Tutuncu, 2024), even as many UJs maintain long-standing peer review traditions through their university presses (Rosenbaum, 2017). Their sustainability is further constrained by limited access to stable, long-term funding models (Laakso & Multas, 2023). This marginalization is partly rooted in historical changes in academic publishing after 1945, when there was a significant shift in control over publishing systems from academic institutions to commercial structures. This undermined the autonomy of university publications and entrenched commercial models as the standard for quality and visibility (Fyfe et al., 2017).

Recent developments present both opportunities and persistent gaps. On the one hand, the proliferation of Diamond OA publishing initiatives, the rise of library publishing programs (Roh, 2014), and the emergence of open journal metadata infrastructures (e.g., OpenAlex, Crossref) have created new opportunities for re-evaluating the role of UJs. On the other hand, the global distribution of UJs remains under-explored and under-theorized. The extant literature on the subject has historically centered on individual countries, regional systems (e.g., Latin America, Eastern Europe, Sub-Saharan Africa), or specific functional aspects such as editorial governance, peer review, or financing models (Domínguez & Marti-Lahera, 2023; Stojanovski & Mofardin, 2023; Nazarovets, 2024). Consequently, there is a paucity of comprehensive, cross-platform understanding of how UJs are distributed, indexed, and represented within global scholarly infrastructures.

This study responds to this gap by implementing an inclusive mapping of UJs aggregating data from Ulrichsweb Global Serials Directory (Ulrichsweb), OpenAlex, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), Scopus, and Web of Science (WoS) Core Collection. The goal is to produce a metadata-driven analysis of the global UJ landscape, focusing especially on the following questions:

How many active university journals are there in the world? When did they start publishing? How comprehensively are these journals included in various bibliometric indexes? How are they distributed across countries, disciplines, and across publication languages? What share of the journals are currently publishing OA? These data also offer a basis for evaluating whether the existing scale, distribution, and organizational configurations of university-based journals are sufficient to support any realistic shift away from commercial publishing models.

Previous research

The existing research concerning UJs consists mainly of two threads, (1) bibliometric studies utilizing various data sources that have included identification of UJs as part of the study, and (2) non-bibliometric research that concerns organizational and operational circumstances for journals of this type. Since this study focuses firmly on contributing towards the former, we direct interested readers of non-bibliometric research to Nazarovets (2025a) that presents a recent literature review comprising 105 publications that related to the concept of UJs. The review analyses research publications from 1995 to 2024 and examines key aspects such as funding models, editorial practices, and the technological infrastructure of UJs worldwide. Among the main challenges identified are the limited international visibility of journals, often due to language barriers and insufficient indexing in global databases, financial instability, significant dependence on university budgets, and problems related to a lack of professional editorial staff.

In bibliometric mappings of UJs, the selection of the population (the journal indexing service) and the inclusion criteria (how are UJs defined and detected) are key attributes that influence the outcome of each study. No bibliometric journal indexing service is fully comprehensive, each providing a different global representation of scholarly publishing, and no indexing services provide direct tagging and filtering to UJs specifically so it is up to the methodology choices made by individual researchers how studies have designed around these factors. Understanding the impacts of these choices, especially in the context of underrepresented publishing models such as UJs, is important for interpreting the contributions of each study.

Repiso et al. (2019) used the WoS Master Journal List, Ulrichsweb, and journal websites to identify 1,492 university-published journals. They found that only 11.6% of WoS-indexed journals are from universities, mostly concentrated in top institutions like Cambridge University Press and Oxford University Press, with the strongest presence in humanities and social sciences.

Kulczycki et al. (2025) conducted a study on journals published in seven countries across Europe and Latin America: Argentina, Brazil, Colombia, Finland, Mexico, Poland, and Türkiye. The study utilized ISSN Center data in combination with national sources in order to get an as comprehensive population as possible, building a dataset of 15,053 journals, and then comparing the result with which of these journals were included in WoS, Scopus, and OpenAlex. Educational institutions were found to be the most common publisher organization type in several countries, publishing over 75% of journals in Colombia and Brazil and over 50% in Mexico, Argentina and Poland. The only relatively low share of publishers of this type was Finland with 19%, where rather scholarly societies dominate the national publishing environment. OpenAlex was found to cover over 50% of the journals in most of the studied countries, while WoS and Scopus only contained 8.5% and 10.2% respectively. Overall notable is that 94.5% of all journals included in the study were published by publishers that publish only one journal.

University journals among open access journals

The presence of UJs has been researched particularly in the context of research on OA journals, where UJs have often had strong representation. Solomon (2013) conducted a publisher type study on the 1948 active OA journals listed in the DOAJ that were included in the Scopus bibliometric database in 2011, relying on manual classification of publishers based on the information found in Scopus or on the websites of the journals. The study found that university-published journals made up 24% (460) of the titles and 14% of the article volume (21,279) of all Scopus-included OA journals published in 2010. Only 15% of the UJs charged an APC, which was the second-lowest share, only after government published journals. Distinct for UJs were also their strong representation in the social sciences and arts and humanities, having a dominantly higher share than any publisher type in these.

Crawford (2025) recently conducted a study on the entire DOAJ, where publisher type was one of the central attributes. Publisher categorization was conducted manually by the author. Of all the 20,109 active OA journals that were included in the directory at the start of 2025, 61% (12,270) were published by a university, college or institute. These journals had the highest share of no-APC titles of any publisher type, at 80% of all journals in the category. The vast majority of the journals in this category, 8,017 (65%) belonged to the Humanities and Social Sciences. The top countries with the most journals by this publisher category were Indonesia, Brazil, Spain, and Poland.

In a study researching of once active OA journals that have vanished from the web, Laakso et al. (2021) found that university-affiliated journals made up 40% (70 of the 174) of those found to have disappeared. While the high representation of UJs is in line with their overall presence among OA journals in general, there are likely factors unique to UJs that can make their existence volatile.

Universities collaborating with other organizations for journal publishing

Most bibliometric studies that include distinction between publisher types, like all the ones mentioned in this section so far, do so on the basis of whatever single organization is mentioned in the publisher metadata field from where the bibliometric data is extracted. However, in reality there are often multiple organizations of various types involved in variable constellations sharing the ownership, governance, and work required to operate the journal. There are so far a couple of studies that have studied dimensions related to this additional layer of complexity that are useful for better understanding also the situation of UJs and their publishing arrangements.

In a study covering all Australian scholarly journals, Jamali et al. (2022) utilized the “Corporate Author” metadata field found in Ulrichsweb to investigate what type of organizations are behind the journals in addition to the organization designated in the “Publisher” metadata field. The study conducted manual categorization of both publishers and corporate authors, where universities were part of the “Educational institutions” category. Of the 651 active journals that were included in the study, 168 (26%) had an educational institution as the corporate author. Of these, most of 131 also self-published the journal, but some also relied on other organizations for acting as the publisher: International commercial publisher (21), Educational institution (11), Small commercial publisher (3), and Government (2). Most of the Australian OA journals that do not charge APCs are self-published by educational institutions.

Taskin et al. (2023) analyzed 21,886 journals in the WoS Core Collection (2022) to identify publisher types and issuing bodies based on ISSN Center records. They found that 17% were published by universities, rising to 28% when journals issued by research organizations were included. A notable share were journals formally issued by research organizations but published by professional publishers. These titles showed a distinctive language profile, with higher proportions of non-English and multilingual journals, particularly in Latin America. Consistent with other studies, research-organization journals were most strongly concentrated in the social sciences, humanities, and arts.

This body of bibliometric studies highlights the need for a pluralistic approach when analyzing the global journal landscape. No single bibliographic source suffices; instead, a combination of different sources are required to adequately represent the diversity of UJ publishing.

Methodology

Data collection and processing

This study uses a multi-database approach to identify UJs, with Ulrichsweb serving as the primary data source due to its extensive coverage and advanced filtering capabilities. The database has previously been employed in large-scale bibliometric research. Mongeon and Paul-Hus (2016) used Ulrichsweb, comparing it to coverage in WoS and Scopus, finding linguistic, disciplinary, and geographic biases in both indexes, reinforcing the role of Ulrichsweb as a more neutral and comprehensive starting point. Similarly, Laakso and Multas (2023) used Ulrichsweb to map scholarly journals from small- and mid-sized publishers across Europe, for which the more inclusive bibliometric data was better suited to capture also smaller and non-English journals. Based on Ulrichsweb data, Nazarovets (2024) reviewed scholarly journal publishing in Ukraine, demonstrating the potential of this database for underrepresented journals. However, even though Ulrichsweb contains a comprehensive number of journals globally, it should not be assumed that all scholarly journals are included, for that one would need to collect national and regional datasets which this study does not do.

We queried Ulrichsweb between March and May 2025, extracting metadata for all active peer-reviewed, academic/scholarly journals, resulting in an initial dataset of 99,347 entries.

In this study, UJs are defined based on the institutional nature of their publisher. A journal is considered a UJ if it is currently published by a university or an organizational unit operating under the authority of a HEI. This includes faculties, departments, university libraries, university research centers, and university presses. While publishing models and levels of autonomy may vary, such entities function within the formal structure of their parent institutions. Accordingly, journals published by long-established university presses, such as Oxford University Press or Cambridge University Press, are included, despite occasionally being classified as commercial publishers in other typologies. Their inclusion reflects the diversity of historical and structural roles of institutional publishing models across academic systems.

We deliberately adopted the broader category of HEIs rather than restricting the scope to entities explicitly labelled “university”. This approach acknowledges the global diversity of academic publishing structures. In many national contexts, UJs are issued not only by universities but also by specialized HEIs, such as polytechnic institutes, colleges, or professional schools, that fulfil comparable academic and publishing functions. Affiliation was determined using a two-step process. First, we used the World Higher Education Database (WHED) (International Association of Universities, n.d.) to identify institutional name variants, standardize the recognition of HEIs across countries and country-level counts of HEIs. Second, based on this WHEN, we developed a multilingual keyword-matching algorithm in Excel that searched the metadata extracted from Ulrichsweb for institutional descriptors associated with universities across various languages. This filtering process yielded a subset of 39,916 journal records likely to be affiliated with universities.

Due to variations in ISSNs and titles across different formats (online, print etc.), many journals were represented by multiple entries. We therefore conducted a deduplication process to consolidate duplicate records, which included both automated filtering and manual review. In addition to resolving duplicates, we performed a manual validation step to confirm the institutional affiliation of each journal. After this cleaning and validation process, our final dataset comprised 19,414 unique UJs that appear either in print, on the web, or both formats. The ISSN list has been deposited in Zenodo (Taşkın et al., 2025a), to serve as a reference for future research.

Subject metadata for each journal were retrieved from Ulrichsweb using its primary classification scheme. To enable cross-comparison with international standards, we converted Ulrichsweb subject categories to the OECD Fields of Science and Technology (FOS) classification. This conversion followed the methodology proposed by Taşkın et al. (2024), with one modification: the “Social Sciences” and “Humanities” fields were merged into a single category to simplify disciplinary groupings. Journals assigned to more than two subject categories were classified as “Multidisciplinary” to reflect their broader scope. The detailed conversion schema is presented in Table 1.

Country and language information for each journal was also obtained from Ulrichsweb. Following the Ulrichsweb classification, our dataset includes both sovereign states and non-sovereign territories or regions (e.g., Guam, Macau, United States Virgin Islands), which are listed individually as countries in the database. For the classification of countries, we applied the World Bank’s (2025) country classification scheme, which groups countries based on income levels and geographical regions. Language data were categorized into four distinct classes to reflect linguistic diversity and dominance: (1) English, (2) Multilingual with English, (3) Multilingual without English, and (4) Other Languages (i.e., single-language journals in languages other than English).

To evaluate the visibility of UJs in major global indexing systems, we cross-referenced the final UJs dataset with publicly available journal lists from four different types major databases: selective commercial (Scopus and the WoS Core Collection), inclusive OA indexing (DOAJ), and emerging open bibliometric infrastructures (OpenAlex). For Scopus, we relied on the Source title list provided by Elsevier (n.d.). For the WoS, we utilized the Master Journal List provided by Clarivate (n.d.). All index lists (for the Science Citation Index Expanded (SCIE), the Social Sciences Citation Index (SSCI), the Arts & Humanities Citation Index (AHCI), and the Emerging Sources Citation Index (ESCI)) were retrieved in May 2025 to ensure consistency in temporal coverage. The OpenAlex data were obtained from an open dataset published on Zenodo (Van Eck, 2024). The DOAJ data were retrieved from the official Public Data Dump (DOAJ, n.d.). Journals were matched across these sources using available identifiers, ISSNs, eISSNs, and ISSN-Ls, as well as title information, to determine their presence in each indexing service.

Each database offers distinct strengths and limitations. DOAJ, for instance, is widely used to study the structural characteristics of OA publications specifically. Del Río Riande and Lujano Vilchis (2024) use the DOAJ database to explore the multilingual landscape of OA journals, highlighting DOAJ’s value for mapping underrepresented journals and examining global patterns of bibliodiversity. In a recent comparative study, Simard et al. (2025) conducted a systematic comparison of the geographic and linguistic coverage of gold and diamond OA journals in OpenAlex, Scopus, and WoS. They found that diamond journals are significantly underrepresented in commercial databases, and OpenAlex is better in coverage concerning journals in non-English national languages, lower-income regions, and the SSH. These findings further emphasize the need to use multiple databases when assessing the visibility of university-affiliated journals.

To examine the OA status of UJs, we combined metadata from Ulrichsweb and the DOAJ. Ulrichsweb classifies journals into OA and non-OA categories, while DOAJ provides additional information on whether indexed journals apply article processing charges (APCs).

All data processing and descriptive analyses were conducted using spreadsheet-based operations and standard analytical tools. These were used to clean and merge datasets from Ulrichsweb, DOAJ, Scopus, the Web of Science Master Journal List, and OpenAlex, as well as to generate frequency distributions, cross-tabulations, and proportional indicators.

For visual representation of results, we used Microsoft Excel and Flourish.Studio, a web-based data visualization tool, to generate interactive charts, bar plots, and geographic maps. This approach enabled clear visual presentation of complex patterns in the journal data.

Assessment of the reliability and database-specific limitations

Ulrichsweb: limitations in peer-review classification and journal metadata

As Ulrichsweb served as the primary data source, we conducted a targeted assessment of its metadata reliability. To ensure the inclusion of peer-reviewed scholarly journals, only those explicitly marked in Ulrichsweb as “Refereed/Peer-reviewed” were selected. Nevertheless, this criterion may have inadvertently excluded some peer-reviewed UJs due to incomplete or inaccurate metadata. According to the Ulrichsweb (n.d.), the refereed label is based on publisher self-reporting, which is not always systematically updated.

To identify potential limitations in the automated analysis, a preliminary assessment (January–February 2025) was conducted on a randomly selected sample of 10 countries, without consideration of regional distribution or other selection criteria. We calculated the number of active UJs indexed by Ulrichsweb in each country and determined how many of them had a Refereed/Peer-reviewed metadata entry. For journals lacking this designation, we manually searched their websites for information on peer-review policies. Additionally, we checked whether these journals were indexed in DOAJ using ISSN-based searches.

The results (Table S1) revealed substantial inconsistencies. In several cases, refereed status was missing in Ulrichsweb despite clear evidence of peer review on the journal’s site and inclusion in other databases. For example, in Argentina, 187 active UJs lacked refereed status, yet 53 were confirmed as peer-reviewed on their websites, and 32 appeared in DOAJ. Similar patterns were observed in Bolivia, Yemen, and Cyprus. In countries with few journals, even a single metadata omission could result in full exclusion from the dataset – as in Benin and the Bahamas. However, in some cases, the Ulrichsweb metadata was aligned with verification results. For example, in Barbados (five active UJs), only one had refereed status, while the remaining four lacked sufficient evidence of peer review, confirming the accuracy of Ulrichsweb data.

Overall, this data reliability analysis highlights significant variability in how the refereed label is applied across countries and journals, limiting the precision of automated journal selection. While we acknowledge the potential for both omissions and outdated classifications, manually verifying the entire dataset is not feasible within the scope of this study. Despite such limitations, Ulrichsweb remains the most comprehensive available resource for academic journal metadata.

Also, journals’ founding years recorded in Ulrichsweb are often inaccurate or incomplete. Some entries list implausible founding dates, while others lack information entirely. Moreover, the historical affiliation of journals may have changed over time, but only the current publisher is reflected in the metadata. Consequently, trends in journal establishment must be interpreted cautiously.

Global coverage vs. regional sources

To maintain methodological consistency and avoid regional overrepresentation, Ulrichsweb was used as the single global source for identifying UJs. We did not collect and extract data from regional indexing platforms such as SciELO, Redalyc, Dialnet and CNKI in order to identify UJs. This choice necessarily implies that some university journals indexed only in local or regional databases may not be captured. This limitation should be kept in mind when interpreting country-level totals.

OpenAlex: incomplete publisher-level metadata

In addition to the limitations identified in Ulrichsweb, it is important to acknowledge critical metadata issues observed in OpenAlex. Although OpenAlex holds promise as a more inclusive and open alternative to commercial indexing systems, it suffers from significant gaps in publisher-level metadata, which makes it difficult to identify and classify university-affiliated journals (Nazarovets, 2025b). Specifically, the metadata fields responsible for capturing institutional affiliation, such as host_organization and host_organization_lineage, are often missing for a large share of UJs. These omissions undermine OpenAlex’s potential as a reliable sole source for analysis at the journal publisher level.

Additional metadata uncertainties

Similarly, metadata on OA status is subject to gaps in coverage and inconsistencies. Ulrichsweb OA flags rely on information supplied by publishers that may not reflect policy changes in real time, while DOAJ is a curated, opt-in registry that does not index all OA journals comprehensively. Therefore, differences between the two sources were anticipated.

The HEI counts used for the UJs per HEI indicator reflect the best global HEI registry, WHED. However, the database is not exhaustive as it is dependent on national reporting, which differs across countries, leading to some systems being under- or overrepresented in terms of data availability. These structural inconsistencies should be considered when interpreting cross-national comparisons.

The dataset reflects a snapshot in time (March–May 2025). Delays in updating metadata in Ulrichsweb or other platforms may result in undercounting recently established journals or overcounting ceased ones that are still marked as being active.

Although the dataset was partially verified manually, a complete manual verification of over 19,000 titles was not possible to perform. As a result, errors or inconsistencies may remain in the metadata.

Results

This section presents the main empirical findings of the study, based on the dataset of UJs compiled from Ulrichsweb and cross-referenced with additional metadata from Scopus, DOAJ, OpenAlex, and WoS.

Indexing status and geographical distribution

The dataset includes 19,414 active UJs from 148 countries. Of these, 6,058 are published in online format only, 1,604 in print only, and 11,752 in both formats.

Indexing coverage varied greatly across bibliographic databases (Table 2). All journals in the dataset are listed in Ulrichsweb by definition, since that was the foundational starting point for the data collection. OpenAlex provides the broadest secondary coverage, indexing almost three quarters of all UJs (73.7%, 14,315 titles). DOAJ includes nearly half (45.9%, 8,904), reflecting the strong orientation of UJs toward OA models. Scopus covers 24.7% of the dataset (4,794) and WoS Core Collection only 19.3% (3,740), with substantial variation across its constituent indexes. 17.4% of UJs (3,384) are absent from all four analyzed databases, except Ulrichsweb.

Country-level analysis

At the country level, the distribution of UJs is highly skewed. The United States and Indonesia dominate the landscape (2,188 and 2,131 titles respectively), followed by Brazil, Russia, the United Kingdom, Türkiye, Ukraine, Spain, Iran and Poland (see Table 3). Together, these ten countries account for nearly two-thirds (62.92%) of all UJs identified in Ulrichsweb. At the opposite end of the spectrum, 16 countries are represented by only one title.

To contextualize the raw journal counts, the UJs-per-HEI ratio (Table 3 and Fig. 1) offers additional insight into national publishing intensity. Spain and Türkiye exhibit notably high ratios, indicating dense journal activity relative to system size. The UK also shows a high value, although this figure is partly shaped by the substantial global publishing portfolios of its two major university presses Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press, which together operate far beyond the scope of domestic institutional publishing alone. By contrast, the USA, despite having the world’s largest number of UJs