Knowledge Creation about Migration: Analysing Open Access Policies and Practices in Migration-Related Journals

In recent decades, the open science movement and open access practices have developed in various disciplines. Stakeholders, including research institutions, professional organisations, academic journals and others, have focused on making research FAIR, i.e. findable, accessible, interoperable and reusable. These various stakeholders have committed considerable resources to promoting open science. However, there are still questions about the extent to which science and publications are open. In this paper, we address these questions with empirical focus and referring to migration research.

In our analysis, we are interested in the politics and practice of Open Science and Open Access (OA) in the field of migration. Migration debates have long been concerned with the question of how knowledge is created, with a particular focus on the potential biases and juxtaposition of perspectives from the Global North and the Global South (and more recently the Global East). This paper contributes to this debate by analysing how open access policies and practices have evolved in migration-related academic journals. We use metadata on publications in selected migration-related academic journals. We study OA publications in terms of the time of publication, the affiliation of the authors of the articles, the number of citations and others. Our analysis shows not only the development of OA over time, but also the availability of the OA route for different groups of researchers (e.g. from the Global North versus the Global South and East). The analyses are carried out using the metadata of publications from the Web of Science and make it possible to show the extent of OA in the context of migration as well as some of its correlates.