Open Access Journals
Article Processing Charge and Article Influence Score

What is this data?

The data used in the visualization above originates from another project I am involved with called FlourishOA.org. The FlourishOA team collects and analyzes data about Open Access publications. Much of this data is publicly accessible through the FlourishOA.org API.

The variables charted above are:

  • Article Processing Charge (APC): the cost to publish in the given journal
  • Article Influence Score: a measure of influence per article
    • “calculated as a journal’s Eigenfactor Score divided by the number of articles in that journal, normalized so that the average article in the Journal Citation Reports has an Article Influence Score of 1” (West, Bergstrom, & Bergstrom, 2010, p.239 PDF).
  • Date: the date in which the APC data was gathered
  • Journal Category: a category assigned to the journal by Clarivate Analytics Journal Citation Report

How do I use the visualization?

There are several ways to interact with the scatterplot above. The default view shows you all 650 data points. If you hover over a data point, a tooltip will give additional details. If you click on a data point, a quadrant will appear showing part of the graph as a green block and parts as a red block. The green quadrant indicates potential journals which are equal to or higher in Article Influence Score and equal to or lower in APC. The red quadrant indicates potential journals which are equal to or lower in Article Influence Score and equal to or higher in APC. The quadrant will stay in place until you click another data point or make a category selection from the drop down menu. This allows you to compare the data points within the quadrants to the one you have selected. You can also choose to view only journals within certain fields (categories). Choose the appropriate category from the drop down menu above the chart.