In debates around scholarly publishing university publishers are often a secondary consideration after big commercial publishers. Drawing on a new study of the size and scope of university publishing Maryna Nazarovets, Mikael Laakso and Zehra Taşkın argue universities are in fact not marginal actors but a widespread and structurally significant part of the journal publishing landscape, whose role is systematically underestimated because publishing is decentralised, unevenly documented and often weakly institutionalised.
Walk into almost any university and ask: “How many scholarly journals does this institution publish?” In many places, you will not get a quick answer. Not because the university publishes none, but because journal publishing often happens inside the university in ways that are decentralised, unevenly documented and sometimes only loosely connected to central governance.
That is one of the reasons university journals are easy to overlook in global discussions about academic publishing. We tend to picture publishing as something done by large commercial companies, big learned societies or a handful of famous university presses. But universities also publish at scale, across disciplines and in many languages. This matters because funding models, evaluation systems and open access policies are built on incomplete pictures of who actually publishes scholarly knowledge.
We tend to picture publishing as something done by large commercial companies, big learned societies or a handful of famous university presses. But universities also publish at scale, across disciplines and in many languages.
Our recent research into university-published journals started with a simple question: how many scholarly journals are actually published by universities worldwide?
We found a surprisingly large number: 19,414 active, peer-reviewed university-affiliated journals across 148 countries, a collective scale comparable to, or exceeding, many commercial portfolios that dominate policy debates. But the scale of these numbers also reveals how universities organise scholarly communication, and how varied those arrangements are across regions.
What counts as a university journal?
We defined a university journal in relation to its publisher, as a journal currently published by a higher education institution or its unit (a faculty, department, research centre, library or a university press). This sounds straightforward, but in practice it raises a basic question: where does the university end and the publisher begin?
In some countries, a university press is a large, professionalised organisation with a global publishing portfolio. In others, a department may run a journal with volunteer editors and minimal administrative support. Both are “university publishing”, yet they sit at very different points on a spectrum – from highly institutionalised to highly improvised in terms of their placements on the organisational charts.
This spectrum matters. From editorial professionalisation, reliable metadata, digital infrastructure and the stability of funding and staffing, this spectrum shapes what these journals do and how they survive.
A global footprint, but not a uniform one
Through our study we found that university journal publishing is global but highly uneven in its distribution. A small number of countries account for a very large share of titles. In our dataset, the biggest producers include the United States, Indonesia and Brazil. This concentration does not imply that other countries lack scholarly capacity. Rather, it points to different national models of organising scholarly communication, including stronger roles for societies, different institutional arrangements or greater reliance on external publishers.
At the same time, the observed concentration is shaped by what can be seen through global data infrastructures. Our mapping relies on Ulrichsweb, but many university journals remain poorly documented in standardised datasets, suggesting that their global footprint is likely even larger and that more locally grounded and non-standardised methods will be needed to fully capture it.
Universities sustain a language ecology
One of the clearest signs that university journals serve multiple missions is language. Only about 35% of the journals in the dataset published exclusively in English. A substantial share published in a single non-English language, and many are multilingual. This suggests that universities are major stewards of research communication that is addressed to national and regional audiences, publishing scholarship in the languages where it is produced and applied.
universities are major stewards of research communication that is addressed to national and regional audiences, publishing scholarship in the languages where it is produced and applied.
The regional patterns underline this diversity. In some regions, English dominates; in others, non-English publishing is the norm; and in the Middle East and North Africa, we observe a notable share of multilingual journals without English. These differences are not “problems to fix” in a single direction, but reflect distinct scholarly cultures, policy environments and relationships between academia and society. The results make clear that universities are one of the main institutions maintaining multilingual scholarly ecosystems, and that function is easy to undervalue if we only measure “international visibility”.
Why social sciences and humanities sit at the centre
Across regions, university journals are strongly concentrated in the social sciences and humanities (SSH). This makes intuitive sense once we treat university publishing as an institutional service rather than a commercial product. SSH scholarship is often locally grounded, language-dependent and directed toward communities outside narrow international research circuits. University journals can provide stable venues for such work when commercial incentives are weak. The dominance of SSH also helps explain why university journal publishing is so closely connected to debates about bibliodiversity: these journals frequently carry forms of scholarship that do not fit neatly into globalised “one-size-fits-all” publishing models.
At the same time, the disciplinary mix is not identical everywhere. Some regions show higher shares of medical and engineering journals among university titles. Again, this points to institutional publishing as a flexible tool that universities use differently depending on national priorities and infrastructure.
Does university publishing = open access?
The relationship between university journals and open access is often discussed as if it were self-evident. Universities are commonly assumed to be natural homes for non-commercial, publicly-oriented publishing. Our data allow us to examine this assumption, but only in a limited and qualified way.
Depending on where we look, roughly half of the university journals in our dataset appear as open access. But this apparent consistency dissolves once different sources are compared. Journals marked as open access in Ulrichsweb may be absent from the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ), and vice versa.
The same applies to publication fees. Among university journals that are visible in DOAJ, Diamond open access models are common (i.e. journals do not ask authors for article processing charges). But this tells us something only about that visible subset and not university publishing as a whole, since comparable information is not available for the full population and would require manual verification for each journal.
What matters more than any single percentage is the scale and diversity of this experience. University journals operate across all world regions and under very different institutional conditions. They offer a unique empirical window into how open access is organised in practice, one that could and should be researched more in the future.
University journals operate across all world regions and under very different institutional conditions. They offer a unique empirical window into how open access is organised in practice
The hidden work of publishing: metadata, continuity, and institutional memory
If university journals are so numerous, why are they so hard to “see” coherently?
One reason is simply that university publishing is often organisationally fragmented. The journal may live on a departmental website, run through a library publishing programme, be hosted on Open Journal Systems or be managed by a press unit. This decentralisation is productive, as universities can support niche communities, but it creates coordination problems through inconsistent metadata, uncertain histories and unclear institutional ownership.
We had to confront this directly in our study. Journal metadata in different databases may be missing or outdated, founding years can be implausible or incomplete and large-scale manual verification is not feasible. These are not just data cleaning headaches for one specific study. They are symptoms of a deeper issue: universities often publish without fully institutionalising publishing as a recognised function.
What universities can do with this insight
If universities want their journals to be sustainable, and to serve scholarship well, three practical implications follow.
First, treat journals as infrastructure. Many university journals operate on minimal resources and fragile continuity. A small amount of stable institutional support (platform hosting, DOI workflows, archiving and training) can have outsized impact.
Second, invest in metadata as a public good. Good metadata is not cosmetic. It is how journals are discoverable, preservable and analysable. The absence of reliable affiliation data, language data and open access status makes whole parts of scholarly communication hard to study and easy to overlook.
Third, recognise diversity as a feature, not a failure. University journals do not all aim to become global flagship titles. Many exist to support disciplines, languages and publics that universities are meant to serve. A healthy institutional publishing ecosystem will include both internationally-oriented journals and locally-rooted ones.
📑This post draws on the authors’ article, University journals in the global academic publishing landscape: Mapping over 19,000 diverse titles based on Ulrichsweb data, published in Scientometrics.
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