ABSTRACT Despite the dominance of English‐language journals in international databases, the global scholarly publishing ecosystem is far more multilingual. This study presents the first comprehensive analysis of Iran's journal publishing landscape, uncovering a complex ecosystem of 3250 active and 639 discontinued journals published in English, Persian and Arabic. Drawing on multiple national databases and journal websites, we examine language, subject area, ownership, publishing platforms, open access models and indexation status. Our findings reveal distinct patterns: Persian‐language journals dominate in social sciences and humanities, while English‐language journals are concentrated in medical and STEM fields. All journals are locally owned and use domestically developed journal platforms with right‐to‐left language support. The vast majority (99.2%) are open access. Sanctions have limited access to international infrastructure, prompting local innovations such as the Digital Object Recognizer (DOR), a national alternative to DOI. In contrast to mainstream practice, most Iranian journals pay peer reviewers and use a two‐part article processing charge (APC): a non‐refundable fee at submission to cover peer review and a second payment upon acceptance. This study shows the scale and specificity of scholarly publishing in a non‐Western context and challenges the database‐centric view of global publishing by foregrounding local responses to structural constraints.
Jamali et al. (Thu,) studied this question.