Author : Maryna Nazarovets
This study presents the results of an exploratory audit of publisher-affiliation metadata for a selected sample of university-published journals in OpenAlex. A corpus of 60 UJs from 10 countries, chosen to represent low-visibility publishing environments, was examined. Journal records retrieved from OpenAlex in January 2025 and January 2026 were manually verified against Ulrichsweb, the journals’ websites, and the ISSN Portal, in order to assess the journals’ indexing status and the presence of publisher-related metadata.
While OpenAlex indexes a significant proportion of the sampled journals, including titles not covered by major commercial indexing systems, coverage remains incomplete, even for active journals. Furthermore, structured publisher affiliation was rarely found within the sample.
In January 2025, only 9% of indexed journals were linked to a publisher entity via OpenAlex’s publisher-affiliation fields. By January 2026, publisher names appeared more frequently as unstructured text, while the proportion of journals linked to a publisher entity remained largely unchanged.
These results indicate that university journals are often visible in OpenAlex as sources, but are insufficiently represented at the publisher level, limiting the interpretability of institutional publishing activity and obscuring the role of university publishing in the broader scholarly landscape.
DOI : https://doi.org/10.1002/leap.2061
