Followup: some notes on the next 3,000 journals in my scan of DOAJ; compare to the first 6,000… (I sort by publisher, then journal, because that speeds things up). [But note at end: that won’t be true for the next 885 journals…]
A few items do seem interesting.
- Of the 2,825 journals for which data has been recorded (175 are either unavailable or have malware issues), 758 (27%) have fees.
- Of that 758, I find that five (still) have submission fees rather than processing fees–and 22 others have both submission and processing fees. 74 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. Five have membership or similar fee requirements, and three are questionable.
- In 101 of the 758 cases, I gathered the fee status and amount from the DOAJ record because it was not easy to locate within the journal’s website. That’s also the case for 399 journals with (apparently) no fees: info is from DOAJ rather than the journal website.
- Malware is still with us: 55 of the 175 missing cases have malware; 85 are missing or useless; nine are not OA journals (one needs a login, one is an encyclopedia, and several from SpringerNature self-report as hybrid); and 20 are dead or duplicates (most duplicates are renamed journals, with the old name still appearing.
- In 60 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.
The malware problem and a departure
Of the 55 malware cases in this group of 3,000, fully 33 are from Indonesia. That was true for 61 of the 99 malware cases in journals 3,001-6,000 and 19 of the 78 in the first 3,000. That low first 3,o00 showing led me to believe that Indonesia’s malware problem in last year’s study (which DOAJ and others almost totally solved) was pretty much gone.
I no longer believe that, since 113 of a total 232 cases–just under half–are Indonesian journals, So I’m going to do what I did last year (somewhat earlier in the scan): I’ll scan the 880-odd remaining Indonesian journals before the remainder of the 5,100-odd journals. That’s likely to slow things down…
At the end of that process, in addition to reporting the problematic journals to DOAJ (as I’m doing at 3,000-journal intervals), I’ll mount a copy for anyone to view and publicize it: perhaps others can help.
So don’t expect to see the “next thousand” for a while (I may not scan any journals for the next day or two, given life requirements), and when it appears, it’s likely to be…unusual.
