Followup: some notes on the next 1,000 journals in my scan of DOAJ; compare to the first 6,000… (I sort by publisher, then journal, because that speeds things up).
A few items do seem interesting.
- Of the 961 journals for which data has been recorded (39 are either unavailable or have malware issues), 430 (45%) have fees.
- Of that 430, I find that five have submission fees rather than processing fees–and six others have both submission and processing fees. 31 others have fees that vary based on article length (I don’t record that if the surcharge begins at 11 pages or higher) or author count. Two have membership or similar fee requirements, and one is questionable (it states boldly that there is no fee, then–in the next paragraph–states the mandated fee but says it’s a gift).
- In 28 of the 430 cases, I gathered the fee status and amount from the DOAJ record because it was not easy to locate within the journal’s website.
- Malware is still with us: ten of the 40 missing cases have malware (six of the ten from Indonesia); twenty are missing or useless; one requires a login, which makes it not an OA journals; and eight are dead or duplicates (most duplicates are renamed journals, with the old name still appearing.
- In cases where I do have data, the URL in DOAJ did not yield the website but a journal title search in Chrome did yield the website.
Timing
So I’ve done 7,000 in (exactly) seven weeks. That leaves 7.128 to go. Will I be done in seven weeks (and a d ay)?
Almost certainly not. Other stuff happens–and the huge chunk of university-based journals is likely to be slow going. I’m hoping to finish the first pass by the end of April–and then there’s a second pass plus a final pass for malware (after journals have had some time to clean up those cases). Then there’s the normalization, data manipulation, table creation and writing the book(s).
GOA4 (2013-2018) appeared on May 4, 2019; that was unusual. GOAJ3 (2012-2017) appeared on May 28, 2018, and even that was earlier than I’d expected. I’ll be delighted if this year’s GOA5 is ready in early June; I won’t be surprised if it takes into July…
