The List of Open-Access Music Journals, Three Years Later
Or, what I said at the AMS conference
This post is a bit of a departure from the things I usually write about, but open access is an issue I care deeply about. This seems as good a place as any to share it.
Some context: In November 2024, I was one of several panelists to speak on Open Access Publishing in Musicology at the National Meeting of the American Musicological Society in Chicago. Although I went improvised a bit, this is the script I was working off of.
You can view the panel’s slides here. If you are curious about open access as it pertains to music, you can read Kendra Preston Leonard’s bibliography here.
Based on my ongoing work with open-access music journals, I wanted to share a few observations about these journals and their role in the various fields of musical research.
My comments today are based on my List of Open-Access Music Journals, which I have curated in various forms since 2016. The list has several limitations: it only includes journals that focus on music and only includes journals that are fully open-access. So journals that include music as a possible topic are not included; nor are commercially available journals that are available by subscription, but offer authors the opportunity to publish open-access for a fee.
About fees: article processing fees and publication fees are still generally rare among OA music journals. Of the 216 active journals in the List of Open-Access Music Journals, only thirteen publicly advertise that they require fees of any type for publication. The highest advertised fee is $1890, coming from a journal published by Springer.[1] Seventy-eight journals clearly state that they do not charge fees; the rest do not mention publication fees on their websites. This state of affairs exists because many of the journals are sponsored by universities or academic societies that can afford to invest in platinum OA: all but ten of the active journals have a sponsor of some type that presumably supports the cost of the journal. In other words, most OA music journals appear to be truly non-profit operations.
Commercial publishers also have a presence in OA publishing. Taylor and Francis, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, etc. have long offered authors the option to pay a fee to publish an open-access article in an otherwise paywalled journal: this is popularly termed “hybrid” open-access. Their fees are significantly higher than those charged by independently published non-profit journals, with an average APC of about $3500 as of 2024. Cambridge has recently announced several journals that were recently hybrid will now only operate as gold OA. Although they have announced a variety of APC [article processing charge] discounts, this decision might close off journals such as the Cambridge Opera Journal and Nineteenth-Century Music Review to authors who are not eligible for discounts or waivers and cannot afford the APCs. As a scholar of nineteenth-century opera, I was very concerned to learn of Cambridge’s decision regarding these journals.
There have been a few changes since my last analysis of the List of Open-Access Music Journals in 2021. The list itself has grown by 100 entries, including both new journals and digitized issues of old journals that are out of print. There is greater linguistic diversity, although English still dominates open-access music publishing, with over 75% of all open-access journals accepting publications in English. The United States is still the leading producer of open-access music journals, with 58 individual titles or 20% of the whole. The list is still heavily dominated by European journals, with 152 journals or 52% of the whole.
In 2021, I reached several conclusions about the global impact of open-access music journals. Sadly, I cannot depart from them very much. Open-access scholarship is supposed to offer a global exchange of knowledge, but instead, open-access music journals still chiefly offer a vehicle by which Western and Westernized music scholars can circulate their ideas to the rest of the world. The infrastructure is not currently in place for the rest of the world to share its research as easily or conveniently; only 36 journals on the list come from outside Europe, North America, South Korea, and Japan. Meanwhile, commercial publishers continue to popularize profit-driven forms of open-access. There is clearly more work left to do.
[1] EURASIP Journal on Audio, Speech, and Music Processing. https://asmp-eurasipjournals.springeropen.com/about. Accessed 22 Oct 2024.