For years now, I've just been re-using an old Ulrich's estimate of about 25,000 for the total number of active peer-reviewed journals.
Prompted by a recent query from someone, I've checked again, and -- unless I've made a mistake in my search -- the number now seems to have doubled to 55,311.
The parameters I used to get this figure were (1) Active, (2) Journal, (3) Academic/Scholarly, (4) Refereed/Peer-reviewed,
A further breakdown shows that of these 55,311 active peer reviewed journals,
23,527 (43%) are available online
9,354 (17%) are indexed in Thomson-Reuters-ISI's Journal Citation reports
6,962 (13%) are open access journals (freely available online) (Gold OA, presumably not including Hybrid Gold).
769 (11%) of the 9,354 Thomson-Reuters-ISI-indexed journals are open access journals
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According to the last estimate of journals indexed by SHERPA/ROMEO (which does not include all the journals indexed by Ulrichs, but does include most of the top journals indexed by Thomson-Reuters-ISI):
60% of journals recognize the author's right to provide immediate, un-embargoed open access upon self-archiving their final drafts in their institutional repositories.
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It would be helpful if others could check and confirm these figures.
Stevan Harnad
