Geographical and Disciplinary Coverage of Open Access Journals: OpenAlex, Scopus and WoS

This study compares the geographical and disciplinary coverage of Open Access (OA) journals across three databases: OpenAlex, Scopus, and the Web of Science (WoS). Using the ROAD database as a reference, which indexes 62,701 OA resources, the study found that OpenAlex indexes 34,217 journals, compared to 7,351 in Scopus and 6,157 in WoS. Notably, OpenAlex includes 25,658 exclusive journals, while WoS and Scopus have far fewer. Geographically, WoS and Scopus favor Europe, North America, and Oceania, while OpenAlex offers broader inclusivity but still shows biases, particularly underrepresenting regions like Africa and some emerging countries.