Examining the geographic and linguistic coverage of gold and diamond open access journals in OpenAlex, Scopus, and Web of Science

Abstract Diamond open access (OA) journals are a publishing model that is free for both authors and readers, but their lack of indexing in major bibliographic databases compared to gold journals presents challenges in assessing their uptake. Furthermore, the characteristics of diamond journals, such as language and country of publication, have often been used to support the argument that they are more diverse and serve national research communities. However, there is a notable lack of empirical evidence regarding their geographical and linguistic characteristics. Using the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as a benchmark, we investigate OA journals through their coverage in OpenAlex, Web of Science (WoS) and Scopus by field, country, language. The results show the lower coverage of diamond journals in WoS and Scopus and confirms the national scope of diamond journals compared to gold. The share of English-only journals is considerably higher among gold journals in every database. High-income countries have the highest share of authorship in every domain and type of journal, except for diamond journals in the social sciences and humanities. Understanding the current landscape of diamond OA indexing can aid the scholarly communications community and decision-makers in advancing policy and practices toward more inclusive OA models.