University journals (UJs) represent a structurally underrecognised segment of the scholarly publishing ecosystem. In this study, UJs are defined as scholarly periodicals published or managed by higher education institutions (HEIs). The category encompasses a wide range of organizational models: journals may be issued by university presses, libraries, departments, or published in collaboration i.e. with learned societies and commercial publishers, while maintaining institutional ownership.

Prominent examples such as Oxford University Press and Cambridge University Press illustrate how university-affiliated publishers can also function as major global commercial actors. Typically aligned with the academic priorities and research missions of their parent institutions, UJs often provide platforms for disseminating institutional and disciplinary scholarship.

Many operate under open access models, frequently without article processing charges, or at significantly lower rates than for-profit journals, as they are often supported through a combination of institutional funding, research grants, and national or regional infrastructure programmes (Solomon & Björk, 2012). However, some also follow a subscription-based publishing model.
The landscape of UJs is highly uneven across regions: while they represent key publication venues in some countries, they are nearly absent or marginalised in others. Despite their potential, UJs remain underrepresented in scholarly communication research and are frequently excluded from major indexing infrastructures and policy frameworks (Laakso & Pölönen, 2023).

This talk introduces an ongoing research initiative that aims to map, analyze, and ultimately strengthen the role of UJs within the global scholarly communication ecosystem. The project is grounded in a structured literature review (Nazarovets, 2025b, in press), which identified limited international visibility, fragile funding models, editorial and peer-review weaknesses, and infrastructural deficiencies as key challenges affecting UJs across diverse contexts. These findings provided the conceptual foundation for the empirical phases of the project.

The current phase of the study focuses on constructing a global landscape of UJs using Ulrichsweb as the primary source for identifying journals, with supplementary data from OpenAlex, DOAJ, Scopus, and Web of Science used to assess indexing coverage, metadata completeness, and visibility patterns across regions (with preliminary estimates suggesting approximately 17,000 titles worldwide).

Preliminary results reveal that UJs are often bibliographically invisible: only a small fraction are indexed in Scopus, Web of Science, or DOAJ (which affects the global picture of open access publishing), and platforms like OpenAlex, despite their broader scope, still suffer from incomplete metadata and poor institutional disambiguation (Nazarovets, 2025b). This mapping will serve as the basis for the next phase of the project: a series of empirical case analyzes that examine editorial practices, peer-review standards, technological capacity, and international engagement in selected national and regional contexts.
The project contributes both conceptually and empirically to current debates on knowledge equity and infrastructure plurality by highlighting the role and potential of UJs within the modern academic ecosystem. At the same time, it aims to diagnose and address the structural challenges that prevent many UJs from being recognized as credible, open, and trustworthy venues for scholarly communication. For example, concerns have been raised about a characteristic feature of the editorial process of UJs, which has different cultural, political and institutional causes in different regions, and is known as ‘editorial endogamy’ – the dominance of editors and authors affiliated with one institution that publishes the journal, which undermines transparency, meritocracy and the internationalization of scholarly publications (Tutuncu, 2024). These findings will inform a set of reform-oriented recommendations aimed at improving the sustainability, legitimacy, and governance of UJs.

The project contributes to scholarly communication scholarship on multiple levels. Conceptually, it offers a data-driven reframing of UJs as a distinct category of non-commercial publishing, with specific risks and responsibilities. Methodologically, it develops a reproducible workflow for identifying and analyzing UJs across fragmented infrastructures. Practically, it proposes recommendations for improving their visibility, quality, and sustainability – targeting editors, institutions, funders, and policy-makers. It acknowledges the valuable contributions of European projects such as DIAMAS and CRAFT-OA, which focus on the institutional open-access publishing landscape. However, this study adopts a broader global perspective, encompassing UJs operating within and beyond open access models.
By providing a granular and comparative analysis of university-based publishing, this study exposes overlooked infrastructural and evaluative gaps that continue to marginalize UJs within global scholarly communication (Shearer, 2020). It argues that quality, openness, and equity in academic publishing cannot be achieved without recognizing and supporting the institutional venues where much non-commercial research takes place. Addressing these blind spots requires rethinking not only the indexing and funding mechanisms, but also the conceptual place of university journals in current models of research assessment and open science policy.

The study was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG, German Research Foundation) – project number 541976107, titled “The Role of University Journals in Scholarly Communication in an Academic Publisher Oligopoly Environment.”