Equity in Scholarly Visibility: Bridging the Gap for Journals using Open Journal Systems in OpenAlex

This poster explores the global coverage of 47,625 journals using Open Journal Systems (JUOJS) by OpenAlex. We find that OpenAlex covers 71% of OJS journals, and that Digital Object Identifiers play a significant role in being covered, particularly for journals registered through CrossRef. Specifically, journals using CrossRef have 96% probability of being covered by OpenAlex. We also analyze the potential reasons for use of DOIs among the JUOJS journals, finding that belonging to repositories of journals and being published in a country in which there is a significant number of OJS journals produces a 73% chance of using DOIs. We use decision trees to find sets of rules for being covered by OpenAlex and using DOIs, and include demographic variables, visibility metrics, and discoverability factors of journals. The findings suggest that while OpenAlex provides substantial coverage, reliance on DOIs may perpetuate inequalities in access to information infrastructures, suggesting the need for alternative mechanisms like web crawling.