Almost 200 scholarly journal titles were published in Lithuania in 2020

The Lithuanian Association of Serials conducted a study of Lithuanian scholarly journals on the application of publishing technology, open access, registration in databases and other indicators.

Neither in Lithuania nor in the world do we have a database of peer reviewed scientific journals that allows us to get a complete picture of the country’s scholarly publishers. The study gathered information about 194 journals from 57 Lithuanian publishers who published at least one issue in 2020. The detailed results of the study are presented in Lithuanian here.

Basic data

The largest publishers in terms of journal titles are Vilnius University (40 titles), Vytautas Magnus University (21), Vilnius Gediminas Technical University (15) and Kaunas University of Technology (10). The largest private publisher is JVE International, JSC (7).

In terms of the type of publisher, universities account for the majority (113 titles) (58.2% of all journals published). Colleges, research institutes, centres, associations, societies, academy of sciences, publishing houses, and libraries publish the remaining 81 titles.

Most of the journals are owned by the state or municipality (78.9%). Private publishers publish 12.4% (24 titles) of all journals. Almost 9% of journal titles are of a hybrid type of ownership.

Publishing platforms

Almost half of the journals (45.4%) use an Open Journal Systems (OJS) publishing platform. About a third (32%) of the titles are still published on websites that are only partially adapted to publish scholarly journals.

More than half of the journals use a professional technology to get manuscripts (55.7%). Many (44.3%) still use e-mail as a key technology to accept submissions.

More than half (52.1%) of the journals use professional review management technologies. 47.9% still use e-mail, MS Excel or similar technology. Identical percentages also exist when evaluating the technology used for managing language editing and production stage.

Digital identifiers

Most of Lithuanian scholarly journals (81.4%) register articles DOI. Of those who do not register, the highest proportion is in the field of medical and health sciences (35.3%), and humanities (24%).

Content licences

68.05% journals apply one of the Creative Commons (CC) licences and are classified as open access. The least open (Copyright ©) are journals in the field of natural sciences (41.2% of all titles), agricultural sciences (42.9%), and humanities (44%). Almost 41% (79 titles) of journals are registered in the DOAJ, although under the applicable licence, 68% (132 titles) are to be considered open access journals. It means that 53 journals additionally could be registered in the DOAJ.

Science fields

Lithuania mainly publishes social sciences (66 titles) and humanities (50) journals. These two fields account for 60% of all journals published in Lithuania. This figure is close to the number of social and humanities journals registered in the Ulrich database in 2015.

Number of articles and APC

Less than one-fifth (18.1%, or 35 titles) of journals apply APC in full or in part. Of these, 31 are open access journals (16% of all open access journals).

The highest percentages of journals that apply APC are in the fields of technology sciences (50% of all journals in the field), social sciences (25%), and medicine and health sciences (23%).

Registration in Scopus and WoS

In 2019, a third (33.7%, 65 titles) of Lithuanian journals were referenced in the Elsevier Scopus database.

In the same year, almost 12% (23 titles) of Lithuanian journals were referenced in the Clarivate Analytics Web of Science (WoS) database.

Acknowledgements

The study was conducted in collaboration with the Lithuanian Association of Serials, the Science Publishing Cluster, Vilnius University Press and Kaunas University of Technology.