Open Editors Plus 2026: Editorial Board Composition of 15,000+ Academic Journals

Open Editors Plus v6.2.0 is a comprehensive, openly licensed dataset of editorial board positions across 15,146 academic journals from 48 publishers. It contains 920,966 records covering 722,124 unique editors in 201 countries. Each record is enriched with: Institutional affiliation canonicalized via ROR (Research Organization Registry), with country, city, organization type, geographic coordinates and the organizations above it in ROR (parents and all ancestors) Gender inference from the country-aware World Gender Name Dictionary 2.0 (WGND 2.0), using the ROR-resolved country to disambiguate names, with a 0.75 confidence floor; the weight, sample size and provenance are retained per record The editorial role, standardized into ten categories, with a flag for positions held by former, honorary or emeritus editors, the number of current chief editors of each board, and a flag for boards whose chief-editor labels look carried over Bibliometric indicators (h-index, works count, citations, academic age) from OpenAlex Journal identifiers: ISSN-L and OpenAlex source checked against each journal's title and publisher, and the print and electronic ISSN from the NLM Catalog, DOAJ and Crossref; journal classification (domain, field, subfield, topic) from the journal's own OpenAlex articles, with a Multidisciplinary label from the Norwegian Register for Scientific Journals, and an impact quartile computed within each field Journal indexing status (PubMed/MEDLINE, Scopus, Web of Science, DOAJ, COPE) Norwegian Publishing Indicator (NPI) level Board-level diversity metrics (gender balance, geographic concentration, institutional diversity) and multi-board indicators, including the published editor_key so the deduplication behind the 722,124 figure is directly reproducible The dataset extends the original Open Editors project (Nishikawa-Pacher, Heck & Schoch, 2023, Research Evaluation 32(2), 228–243) with roughly twice the journal coverage and substantially more enrichment. What changed in v6.2.0. A corrected release: affiliations, names and roles repaired from the board pages, and affiliations the ROR matcher left blank matched. 6,324 records take the affiliation their board page gives, 5,814 change editor name (surnames and name words a cleaner had cut are restored), and 89 assistants to an editor move from editor to other. 994 records that held no person (a page label, an address) or listed a person a second time are dropped, and with them 19 journals whose only record was a page label. Every organization match of v6.1.0 was audited against ROR's data dump, and every affiliation left without an organization was read: 70,657 records change organization (59,519 gain one, 9,915 move to another, 1,223 lose their match), so 93.2% of the records with an affiliation carry an organization (86.4% before), on 27,377 ROR records. Gender changes on 2,902 records, and unique editors go from 731,244 to 722,124, as an editor's records that gain the organization of their other records now count as one editor. data_version is 2026.8. Analyses by organization, country or gender should be re-run. What changed in v6.1.0. A corrected release that repairs ROR matches and adds four columns (87 in all). The new organization matches of the v6.0.0 ROR refresh were audited: every match sharing fewer than half of its organization's name words and every match flagged by screens was read by hand, and the error rate of the rest was estimated from a sample. 7,926 curated rules correct wrong matches, give research institutes named with their parent their own record, and clear matches to strings that name no organization in ROR: 14,359 records change organization (13,433 move, 777 lose their match, 149 gain one). Records on an inactive ROR record move to its successor (408), and organization names and countries follow ROR's current records. New columns: ror_parent_ids, ror_parent_names, ror_ancestor_ids and ror_ancestor_names (157,933 records have a parent in ROR), so that an editor can be found under every organization above their own. Gender changes on 57 records, and unique editors go from 731,230 to 731,244. data_version was 2026.7. What changed in v6.0.0. A corrected release with six new columns (83 in all). The role rule had missed plural headings such as "Editors-in-Chief", so thousands of chief editors were labelled plain editors in every release since v2.7.0; the corrected rule, with new rules for advisory, handling, staff and book-review roles, changes role_std on 105,765 records, and chief editors go from 17,239 to 19,409. New columns: role_is_former (10,533 records whose heading names a former, honorary or emeritus editor), board_eic_count and board_roles_suspect (56 journals whose chief-editor labels look carried over), and issn_print, issn_electronic and issn_type_source (14,263 journals). The affiliations without an organization were matched to ROR again: 120,494 records gain one, so 81.1% of records carry an organization (68.1% before) and the dataset covers 194 countries. Gender is recomputed where the country changed or the stored value was stale (5,513 records change gender), and editors listed at one institution under several affiliation texts are now one editor (731,230 unique editors; 744,797 before). 45 more journals take an audited ISSN-L, and one is corrected again. data_version was 2026.6. Full release notes are given under Series information below. Files included: openeditors_plus_2026.csv — full dataset (UTF-8, 87 columns, 911 MB) openeditors_plus_2026.parquet — the same data in compressed columnar format (97 MB) codebook.json — a machine-readable codebook documenting all 87 columns with names, types, descriptions and provenance, to support FAIR interoperability Versioning. This deposit is version 6.2.0. The concept DOI 10.5281/zenodo.19468382 always resolves to the latest version; cite this record's version DOI 10.5281/zenodo.23791792 to refer to this exact snapshot. The paper describing the dataset (Quantitative Science Studies) uses v3.0.0, 10.5281/zenodo.21620278. Personal data. The records name real people and include an inferred gender attribute. CC0 waives copyright and database rights only; it does not waive the data-protection rights of the people described, and anyone reusing the records remains responsible under the data-protection law that applies to them, in particular the EU GDPR. How the data are processed is set out at openeditors-plus.org/privacy; listed editors can have their record corrected or removed through openeditors-plus.org/corrections or by writing to [e-mail]. License: CC0 1.0 (public domain dedication)Website: https://openeditors-plus.orgCode: the enrichment and analysis code is available from the author on reasonable request.