Free scientific journals

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) is a website that lists scientific journals you can read and download at NO cost.

If you look at their country list, you will probably be surprised. The United States very predictably leads the list with 1293 journals registered as of this year.

Do not even try to guess which countries follow in spots 2 to 10.

You will get it wrong, and that tells us a lot about the value of knowledge and the, how else to phrase it, rip-off culture in the world of scientific and technical journals.

Here is the list of the top ten countries and the number of freely accessible publications as of March 2013:

U.S.      1293
Brazil   821
UK       580
India    483
Spain   452
Egypt   352
Germany 283
Canada   259
Romania 258
Italy        240

If we look at the grouping by subject, we can probably safely claim that soft sciences like "literature and languages" are a little over represented, with a total of about 500 for "literature and languages" compared to the grand total in "technology and engineering" clocking in at no more than 1000.

This should not be seen as criticism, merely as an illustration of which sectors seem to embrace the concept with more ease than others, and which sectors continue to try selling overpriced journals to the public.

We are also not quite sure if there are other directories with different rates of sign-up for different countries.