Open Editors Plus: A Comprehensive Dataset of Editorial Board Composition Across 15,000 Academic Journals

Abstract

Editorial boards serve as central gatekeepers in scholarly publishing, yet comprehensive, enriched data on their composition has remained scarce. We introduce Open Editors Plus, a dataset of 922,097 editorial board positions across 15,168 journals from 48 publishers, covering 745,125 unique editors in 189 countries. Each record is enriched with algorithmically inferred gender, institutional geolocation via the Research Organization Registry, bibliometric indicators from OpenAlex, and journal indexing status across five major databases. Among editors with gender-resolvable names (primarily European-origin; 18% of records are unresolved; 82% resolved), 33% are women, with Editors-in-Chief at 24.9%. Geographic concentration is extreme (Gini = 0.90); the top 10 countries hold 71% of positions. One in four editors serves on multiple boards, and multi-board editors have substantially higher h-indices. The dataset is released under CC0 on Zenodo (DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.21620278) with an interactive explorer at openeditors-plus.org.