Mapping the publisher types and collaborations behind Web of Science indexed journals

Abstract Although the organizational aspects of scholarly journals—such as the types of organizations responsible for publishing individual journals, whether independently or in collaboration—have significant implications for scholarly communication, they have received little focused research attention on a large scale. This study provides a comprehensive analysis of all Web of Science (WoS) indexed journals (N = 21,886), focusing on the types of organizations that are officially attached to publishing the journals, either alone or together. We also investigate the disciplinary, geographical, and linguistic diversity, and the key bibliometric characteristics, of journals (co)published by different types of organizations. By augmenting WoS metadata with a custom classification concerning organizational information about the journals publishing and governing organizations available through the ISSN International Centre, this study provides a larger and more detailed analysis than has been available so far. Our results show that 66% of journals are published by a sole organization type (professional, research organization, society), and 34% respectively are published through combinations of these different organization types. The most common form of collaboration was a professional publisher with a scholarly society as the collaborative organization.