In the 22 Arab states, open access faces endemic challenges, while offering a powerful example of how the diamond model can be successful and sustainable. A project to map the region’s open access journals reveals key trends.
There is general agreement that the advancement of the open science movement has been hindered by a number of factors: the perception that open access is of lesser quality—or even inherently aligned with predatory practices; the disenfranchisement of researchers in lower- and middle-income countries from costly commercial publishing models; the limited availability of, and limited recognition given to, local-language and indigenous research output vehicles; the continued emphasis on (often reductive) quantitative proxies for research excellence that both disregard the scope and scale of impactful research outputs and inadvertently promote mere performative “openness” and performative “impactfulness”; and the insistent emphasis on validation by ranking systems and publications originating in the Global North rather than those produced by and for local research communities.
Of course, these issues and obstacles plague every country and open science community. But in the 22 Arab states, additional issues arise, perhaps most obviously related to the fraught geopolitical climate, the significant scale of conflicts in the region, and the sizable number of countries in crisis, which impede the development and maintenance of essential infrastructures, digital resources, and human capacities for research and education. A second challenge relates to language accessibility. While the issue of bibliodiversity affects many of the world’s research communities, the Arab states face the further challenge of right-to-left (RTL) functionality; many of the essential infrastructures that support the production, dissemination, and preservation of research outputs do not allow RTL features and thus cannot be used by Arabic speakers. Thirdly, while the region might be perceived, from the outside, as a monolithic Arab entity (or a series of smaller monoliths labelled “GCC,” “Levant,” “North Africa,” and “Sub-Saharan,” etc.), it lacks the kind of coherent national or international policy infrastructure that we find supporting the advancement of open science in the Americas, in Europe, and across parts of Asia.
The fourth issue is arguably the most significant: the fact that the principles of open science are being shouldered aside in favor of pay-to-publish approaches that reflect the national and institutional emphasis on ranking-based research assessment priorities. While the intensive pursuit of ranking success might counter some prior mistrust of open access publishing and nominally promote “openness” in the strictest sense of the word, it does not, in practical terms, help to advance the development and implementation of open science policies and practices. Moreover, this emphasis on the recognition and rewards systems of the Global North disadvantages many of the research institutions and research communities within the Arab states, particularly those where English is not spoken, or that wish to protect and preserve their linguistic heritage. This disenfranchisement maintains the dominance of research infrastructures and research publications from the Global North, dictating what counts as “valid” scientific knowledge and tacitly undermining the perceived value of locally established Arab-language publications.
Using data kindly provided by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) and the Public Knowledge Project (PKP), together with information collected during investigations of bibliometric databases and journal websites, I am currently working to map the open access journal landscape of the Arab region by subject, language, location, indexes, and financial model. My goal is to improve understanding of the region’s scholarly communications ecosystems; I plan to make this analysis and the underlying datasets freely available for the region’s stakeholders.
Excluding Iran (which accounts for a hefty 22 percent of the journals within the geographic region but which is not considered an Arab state), 2,509 active journals have been mapped. North Africa (Algeria, Egypt, Libya, Morocco, Tunisia) accounts for 60 percent; the Gulf (Bahrain, Iraq, Kuwait, Oman, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen) accounts for a further 33 percent; the Levant (Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Syria) represents 6 percent; and Sub-Saharan Africa (Comoros, Djibouti, Mauritania, Somalia, Sudan) the final 1 percent.
The results of this mapping project offer a fascinating insight into regional trends.
Perhaps most notably, the vast majority of the mapped journals—99 percent—are open access, due in part to the initial emphasis on DOAJ and PKP datasets. The Levant has the largest percentage of active open-access journals, at 100 percent of mapped journals. The North African bloc has the second largest percentage of open-access journals (at over 99.8 percent of active journals identified within the subregion). Open-access models account for about 98.4 percent of active journals in the Gulf and 96 percent of active journals mapped in the Sub-Saharan bloc. It is worth highlighting that the preeminence of open access publications across the Arab region has largely occurred without national or regional mandates or centralized advocacy.
Of course, some of these journals were launched with an eye on potential revenue streams for the organizations that own them. However, given the high rate of diamond open access journals in every Arab state—including 61 percent of the open access journals mapped in North Africa, 34 percent of those in the Gulf, 56 percent of those from Sub-Saharan African states, and 17 percent of those in the Levant—it is evident that, in many cases, the journal owners have simply internalized the cost, rightly viewing these publications as valuable assets that showcase their faculty research and enhance their institutional prestige.
While this is undoubtedly a positive signal for the open access movement as a whole, the endemic challenges I mentioned earlier continue to plague the Arab region’s journal landscape. It is striking that there are just 247 Arab-language journals in the database, of which only 39 are included in DOAJ and just three are listed in Scopus. This lack of representation is slightly improved when we look at all the mapped active journals, but the Arab region as a whole is still extremely under-represented in the major open access and bibliometric databases. Just 26 percent of the Gulf journals in the dataset are included in DOAJ, 19 percent in Scopus, and 12 percent in Web of Science. North African journals perform similarly with regards to DOAJ (20.4 percent), but just 4 percent of the bloc’s portfolio are included Scopus and Web of Science. The Levant, meanwhile, has 17 percent of its journals in DOAJ, 15 percent in Scopus, and 7 percent indexed in Web of Science. Meanwhile, when we look at the Sub-Saharan Arab states, the numbers fall to below 10 percent across the board.
It is important to note that these figures are not a reflection of the impact and value of the journals to the researchers who read and publish in them—many of these publications are extremely influential and well-established within their fields. But it does highlight how the growth of the Arab region’s academic journal sector is being impeded by the insistent interlinking of quantitative metrics with perceptions of excellence, an approach with detrimental consequences for research in general and movements towards true openness, accessibility, and inclusivity in particular. Moreover, in the case of DOAJ, it also underscores (1) the poor metadata practices of some journals, which preclude their acceptance, and (2) the lack of awareness about the index and limited recognition of the benefits of inclusion among many journal owners and editorial boards.
Some caveats: First, this is an ongoing project; only the initial findings are being shared here. In addition, for some countries in crisis where the destruction of local infrastructures has made data collection difficult—including Yemen, Syria, Palestine, and Sudan——only partial data has been mapped. Moreover, there are a number of journals identified in the ISSN database which, as verification is complicated by their lack of presence elsewhere, have not yet been mapped (this group is largely comprised of older print journals with no digital footprint). Finally, I have excluded journals for which the country of origin is unclear.
Still, the data collected so far offers a useful overview of the state of the region’s open access landscape, from which we can draw three conclusions.
First, there is a significant gap between the production and consumption of research. We need more localized and bilingual journals collecting and distributing Arab-language research to ensure a bibliodiverse plurality of scholarship is made available by and for the region’s scholarly and scientific communities. In addition, researchers should be encouraged to publish in local journals and to re-prioritize local audiences and local languages. Northern hegemonic dominance is insidious. Our scholars publish and present in English as a matter of prestige, to highlight cultured intellectualism as well as boost institutional performance, but more can be done by institutional administrators and national policymakers to protect and preserve the region’s academic heritage and to counter the tendency to discard Arab and Arab-language research output vehicles as lesser.
Second, the region’s journals sector has the potential to provide a powerful example for other regions of how the diamond model can be successful and sustainable when journals are perceived as valuable assets (with global prestige and regional impact serving as the targeted return on investment). But in order for this to happen, local scholarly communication ecosystems need to expand and key stakeholders need to prioritize the accuracy and quality of the journal metadata. A culture of metadata practices needs to be established by these stakeholders to spread awareness of correct protocols, by liaising with relevant organizations, by building regional consortia to get better deals, and by supporting training of institutions and individuals to ensure implementation at all levels from researcher to editor and publisher. Taking these steps would produce better data fields for indexers, increase the visibility of the Arab region’s journals in global indexes, and ensure Arab voices and viewpoints are better incorporated into global discussions and scientific debates.
Finally, it is vitally important for key stakeholders in higher education and research communities to cultivate awareness of the value of indexes and databases beyond Scopus and Web of Science, especially those that showcase the multilingual bibliodiversity of the Arab region’s research. Journal editors and owners should be encouraged to prioritize databases such as the Directory of Open Access Journals—to focus on the globe, rather than the Global North, and thereby center Arab research and Arab journals and maximize audiences and impacts.
I hope that once this project is concluded, the data will help support strategic planning by policymakers, universities, publishers and research communities across the region and ensure the adoption of more accessible, inclusive, and sustainable models for research and education.
10.1146/katina-060525-1
