To celebrate Open Access Week, we’re proud to spotlight Demography, the journal of the Population Association of America. Duke University Press became the publisher of Demography beginning with its 2021 volume, converting the journal from a for-profit commercial subscription model to fully open access.
Since its founding in 1964, Demography has mirrored the vitality, diversity, high intellectual standard, and wide impact of the field on which it reports. Demography presents the highest-quality original population research of scholars in a broad range of disciplines that includes anthropology, biology, economics, geography, history, psychology, public health, sociology, and statistics. The journal encompasses a wide variety of methodological approaches to research. Its geographic focus is global, and it has a broad temporal scope.
Popular articles recently include “Academic Achievement of Children in Same- and Different-Sex-Parented Families,” “Pain Trends Among American Adults, 2002–2018,” “The Effect(s) of Teen Pregnancy,” and “Depends Who’s Asking: Interviewer Effects in Demographic and Health Surveys Abortion Data.”
Demography’s open-access funding model relies entirely on financial support from libraries and other institutions. More than 75 institutions have joined Demography as community partners, making annual commitments from $500 to over $4,000.
“The conversion of Demography is a significant opportunity for the library community to join with other stakeholders in support of sustainable, open-access, university-based publishing,” wrote Celeste Feather, Senior Director of Content and Scholarly Communication Initiatives at library membership organization LYRASIS.
Demography has the top citation ranking in its Social Sciences Citation Index category for 2020 and the second highest impact factor, 3.984, in the category. The journal was cited 9,798 times in 2020.
“The open-access model received a lot of kudos from researchers everywhere, but especially in Europe and the Global South,” wrote Mark D. Hayward, the journal’s editor. “From my end, I couldn’t be happier with the journal’s new model. I think it gets our results into the field faster and helps the science in major ways.”
“We were excited to see the announcement that Demography had switched to a fully open-access model with Duke University Press,” wrote Colleen Lyons, Head of Scholarly Communications at the University of Texas at Austin Libraries, which is one of the journal’s community partners. “Demography is an important journal in the field and for faculty at our institution, and we are pleased to provide support to make sure this journal can continue to publish great research in a more financially viable way. Efforts like this one move the needle towards a more sustainable publishing system that prioritizes the advancement of human knowledge.”
The support of many organizations ensures that Demography’s content is available open access for population researchers all over the globe. Learn how your institution can become a community partner.
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