Open access in AI journals

The 29 tracked AI journals ranked by the share of their 2023–2025 papers that are open access, with each status's share. Open-access status as OpenAlex reports it for each paper (diamond: published in an open-access journal that charges authors no fee; gold: published in an open-access journal; hybrid: open under a licence in a subscription journal; bronze: free to read on the publisher's site without an open licence; green: only a free copy in a repository; closed: no free copy found). Papers count by publication year; the share is of the papers whose status is known. Also as Markdown.

By category: Finance · Accounting · Economics · Health Economics and Policy · Management · Marketing · Information Systems · Tourism and Hospitality · Higher Education and Research · Operations Research · Statistics · AI

Key findings#

Of the 47,799 papers the 29 tracked AI journals published in 2023–2025, 35% are open access (diamond 0%, gold 1%, hybrid 15%, bronze 3% and green 16%).
The open-access share went from 29% in 2017 to 33% in 2025.
The most open journal is Journal Of Big Data (100%), followed by Artificial Intelligence Review (86%) and Machine Learning (85%); the least open is IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems (13%).

Tracked AI journals by open-access share of their 2023–2025 papers (OpenAlex)
#	Journal	Papers 2023–2025	Open access	Diamond	Gold	Hybrid	Bronze	Green	Closed
1	Journal Of Big Data	652	100%	0%	100%	0%	0%	0%	0%
2	Artificial Intelligence Review	1,068	86%	0%	0%	80%	3%	3%	14%
3	Machine Learning	660	85%	0%	0%	49%	25%	10%	15%
4	Journal of Automated Reasoning	95	83%	0%	0%	62%	2%	19%	17%
5	Autonomous Agents and Multi-Agent Systems	131	80%	0%	0%	57%	0%	23%	20%
6	AI & Society	1,178	73%	0%	0%	45%	23%	5%	27%
7	Artificial Intelligence	380	67%	0%	0%	45%	7%	14%	33%
8	Data Mining and Knowledge Discovery	276	67%	0%	0%	48%	3%	16%	33%
9	Nature Machine Intelligence	566	64%	0%	0%	28%	7%	29%	36%
10	Language Resources and Evaluation	251	63%	0%	0%	45%	2%	16%	37%
11	International Journal of Computer Vision	870	63%	0%	0%	22%	4%	37%	37%
12	IEEE Transactions on Pattern Analysis and Machine Intelligence	2,298	57%	0%	0%	7%	0%	50%	43%
13	International Journal of Approximate Reasoning	525	52%	0%	0%	30%	5%	17%	48%
14	Computer Speech & Language	308	44%	0%	0%	23%	2%	18%	56%
15	Neural Computing and Applications	3,369	34%	0%	0%	21%	7%	7%	66%
16	Neural Networks	2,906	33%	0%	0%	11%	2%	19%	67%
17	Pattern Recognition	3,322	32%	0%	0%	9%	2%	21%	68%
18	Knowledge and Information Systems	829	32%	0%	0%	17%	2%	14%	68%
19	IEEE Transactions on Evolutionary Computation	584	32%	0%	0%	6%	8%	18%	68%
20	Information Fusion	2,044	32%	0%	0%	14%	1%	17%	68%
21	IEEE Transactions on Knowledge and Data Engineering	1,446	32%	0%	0%	4%	0%	28%	68%
22	IEEE Transactions on Neural Networks and Learning Systems	2,685	30%	0%	0%	4%	2%	24%	70%
23	Cognitive Computation	438	30%	0%	0%	21%	2%	7%	70%
24	IEEE Transactions on Artificial Intelligence	1,151	27%	0%	0%	4%	3%	20%	73%
25	Knowledge-Based Systems	4,346	26%	0%	0%	11%	1%	14%	74%
26	Expert Systems with Applications	10,390	25%	0%	0%	11%	1%	13%	75%
27	Applied Intelligence	2,632	18%	0%	0%	10%	2%	6%	82%
28	Information Processing & Management	1,141	16%	0%	0%	10%	1%	6%	84%
29	IEEE Transactions on Fuzzy Systems	1,258	13%	0%	0%	2%	4%	7%	87%

By year#

All tracked AI journals: papers per year by open-access status
Year	Papers	Open access	Diamond	Gold	Hybrid	Bronze	Green	Closed
2017	5,465	29%	0%	1%	3%	9%	15%	71%
2018	5,503	31%	0%	1%	4%	9%	17%	69%
2019	6,405	36%	0%	2%	5%	11%	18%	64%
2020	8,527	33%	0%	1%	6%	9%	16%	67%
2021	10,565	38%	0%	2%	10%	9%	17%	62%
2022	13,277	36%	0%	1%	12%	8%	16%	64%
2023	13,689	36%	0%	1%	13%	5%	17%	64%
2024	15,401	37%	0%	1%	16%	4%	16%	63%
2025	18,709	33%	0%	2%	15%	1%	16%	67%
2026 (so far)	16,735	30%	0%	1%	15%	1%	13%	70%

Cite this page

Scholar4AI. (2026). Open access in AI journals. Journal Research Rankings. Retrieved October 31, 2026, from https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/open-access/ai

@misc{scholar4ai-rankings-open-access-ai,
  author = {{Scholar4AI}},
  title = {Open access in AI journals},
  year = {2026},
  howpublished = {\url{https://scholar4ai.com/rankings/open-access/ai}},
  urldate = {2026-10-31},
  note = {Journal Research Rankings; data from OpenAlex (CC0); licensed CC BY-NC 4.0}
}

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