Making research published with OJS count: A key milestone on the road to universal indexing

Discover how expanded OpenAlex indexing improves the visibility and discoverability of research published by journals using OJS worldwide.

Yesterday, OpenAlex announced that it now indexes nearly every journal published with Open Journal Systems (OJS). Of the more than 55,000 active journals using OJS, 95% now have articles in OpenAlex—up from 80% a month ago. More than 10,000 journals appear in OpenAlex for the first time.

OpenAlex describes how they did it, but we wanted to explain why this is such a significant milestone for all of the journals that publish using OJS and, even more, for all the authors who publish in them. 

Uncounted, and often discounted

For better or worse, academic careers, funding decisions, and universities around the world are shaped by the evaluation of research: which journals exist, which articles they publish, and who wrote them. These assessments literally count journals and articles. But if a journal isn’t in a bibliographic database, all that knowledge goes uncounted and is effectively discounted when assessment happens.

That has been the situation for a large share of journals using OJS. Many are published in the Global South, often in languages other than English, and most run by small teams of dedicated scholars at universities and societies. Many are diamond open access, charging neither authors nor readers. These tens of thousands of journals have been doing the work of sharing knowledge, but the major bibliographic databases have not indexed them, leaving them uncounted. 

We have been documenting this for a few years. In 2022, we published Recalibrating the scope of scholarly publishing, which looked at what was then ~25,000 journals using OJS across 136 countries and 60 languages. We found that Web of Science and Scopus included only about 1% and 7% of them, respectively. OpenAlex had around 64%. Last year, we followed up with On the open road to universal indexing, which looked at what was then ~48,000 journals using OJS and asked why some were missing from OpenAlex. The answer was largely technical: journals that registered Crossref DOIs were almost always indexed, while those without them largely were not. Journals with fewer resources, from lower-income countries or publishing without English, were the ones most likely to be left out.

That second finding mattered because it pointed toward a fix. OpenAlex wanted to index all journals and we knew that the data they needed could be found at each journal’s OJS installation. 

A close conversation

In conversation with the PKP team over the course of this year, the OpenAlex team has found a way forward. PKP provided the public list of active OJS journals for OpenAlex to harvest articles directly, rather than waiting for those articles to arrive through Crossref, DataCite, or other aggregators. It is a good example of what open infrastructure makes possible: open source software, an open metadata standard, and an inclusive index willing to use them.

The result is that an additional ~4.2 million works can now be counted for the first time. OJS gave these journals and authors a way to publish and share their knowledge, Google Scholar was the first in making that knowledge discoverable, and now OpenAlex is making it possible for them to be systematically counted in assessment at every level. 

Of course, indexing is not only about being counted in assessment. It is about making the knowledge these journals publish visible, discoverable, and accessible, so that researchers, students, policymakers, and the public can read, cite, and build on it, wherever they are. Any indexing helps with that, and being indexed in OpenAlex adds inclusion in research assessment to the list of benefits.

There is more to do

This is a major step, but more work is needed. While this is a huge improvement, not all journals are indexed, and some remain only partially indexed. PKP Research Associates are building a dataset of all articles known to be published in journals using OJS, which will help assess OpenAlex’s coverage, identify the remaining gaps, and fill them.

This renewed indexing effort also shines a light on the quality of the metadata at the journals themselves. We know there is great variability in how people use OJS, but research assessments will be inaccurate if author names are wrong, affiliations are missing, or metadata contains unexpected or erroneous values. On our end, we will be looking for ways to help editors and authors create the most complete and accurate metadata directly in OJS. Expect to hear the words “metadata quality” a lot more in the coming months!

What you can do now

If you run a journal using OJS, check whether it appears in OpenAlex and whether the information looks right and complete. Some journals are missing because their servers are blocking OpenAlex’s harvester, so make sure to ask your server admin to allow it. If something is missing or looks wrong, check to see what data appears on the article landing pages at your journal. If something is correct at your journal, but is missing or looks wrong on OpenAlex, write them at support@openalex.org (include your journal’s ISSN in the message).

We’re grateful to the OpenAlex team for the work they’ve put into this and to the PKP Research Associates who have been paving the way towards universal indexing. Most importantly, we are grateful for everyone in the PKP community who is putting in the arduous work of making the knowledge public in the first place—their work should never be discounted again.