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Visualizing NISO/ISSN Journal Transfer data in Flourish

Sankey visualizaation

The NISO journal transfer programme (one of the great developments in journals publishing in recent years) has a probably not-sufficiently-known API as part of the ISSN website. The data set is considered to be cc-zero.

Flourish is a dangerously easy-to-use data visualization platform, developed by ex Guardian and Sanger Institute journalists and developers in 2018. It was acquired by Canva in 2022.

Importing the Transfer data to Flourish makes creating something like a Sankey visualization to demonstrate the flow of data relatively easy to produce. As well as publishing it via the Flourish platform, you can also embed the visualization in another website like this:

Some UI/UX/usability considerations:

  • It’s easier to navigate the data in the full screen version (oddly, the embed doesn’t have a link.) And actually you get a larger wide-screen version in your workspace on Flourish than you do on the published version. Zooming in on the browser helps.
  • There are a lot of configuration options, and this is a first attempt so may not be optimal!
  • Clicking one of the year filters, 2023, for example, shows just the data for that year.
2023 data in Flourish
  • Then, for example, if you click the green “Elsevier (12)” blob at the bottom, you see that journals flow into and out of Elsevier. Clicking one of the connectors shows how many journals transferred to/from that publisher. It would be nice to get the underlying data entries for the connections, but that doesn’t appear to be easily achievable.
Visualization of NISO Transfer data
  • Confusingly, the numbers at the end of the lines flowing into Elsevier aren’t the numbers of journals. You get those numbers by clicking an individual line (so 2 from OUP, 4 from Wiley, 3 from SpringerNature).

Further observations on the data set:

  • Number of journal transfers per year
    • Peak in 2015 (341 transfers)
    • Other notable years: 2016 (262), 2013 (174)
  • Unique publishers receiving journals
    • Grew from 9 in 2013 to 20 in 2015
  • Top receiving publishers
    • Taylor & Francis (446 journals)
    • SAGE Publishing (433)
    • Wiley (206)
  • Top transferring publishers
    • Wiley (132 transfers)
    • Libertas Academica (83)
    • Taylor & Francis (66)