Walt at Random

Another pretty good week, with 1,375 journals checked, for a total to date of 2,775. Some metrics:

• Article count (subject to change): 183,636 in 2024; 172,594 in 2023.
• Problematic cases include 63 bi (inactive), 42 xd (defunct), 60 xm (malware), 3 xn (not OA), and 105 xx (unavailable or unworkable).
• 1,204 fee journals and 1,751 no fee (diamond)
• 255 newly-added and 2,520 continuing.
• 472 journals will be rechecked.

The first full week of research for Gold/Diamond OA 2025 is complete (technically, eight days, because I’m using a weekly planner that ends on Wednesday): 1,400 journals scanned.

Summary numbers (thanks to PivotTables):

• 72,571 articles for 2024 (subject to change as some journals are rechecked). 69,112 for 2023.
• 440 journals with fees; 960 diamond journals.
• 169 newly-added journals; 1,231 continuing.
• 248 journals will need rechecking
• While 1,254 journals are “normal” there are quite a few special cases: 34 inactive journals; 16 defunct; 35 malware; 2 that don’t appear to be OA; and 59 that were either inaccessible or unworkable. Note that I’m counting SSL and certificate issues as malware for now; as with all other XM and XX (the last two counts) that weren’t similarly problematic last year, they’ll be rechecked.

Technically, it’s not yet midnight UMT, but it’s pretty close–and as far as I can tell nothing’s been added to DOAJ since I did the last download earlier today. If one or two journals are missing because they were added between 10:30 and midnight on New Year’s Eve, they’ll get picked up next year.

Counting starts tomorrow. The universe to be counted consists of 21,258 journals (three deleted and 27 added since the previous download), of which 7,373 have fees. As before, the four countries (of 136 represented) with more than 1,000 journals each are Indonesia (2,434), UK (2,188), Brazil (1,583) and the US (1,204) and the five subjects with more than 800 are Medicine (4,499), Language & Literature (1,458), Education (1,302), Anthropology (1,254) and Economics (1,234).

Daily updates on Mastodon will start tomorrow or Thursday (and may miss some days); weekly updates will happen on Tuesday or Wednesday most weeks here and on Mastodon. Hashtag #goa10. Hoping to have the first pass completed “sometime in Spring.”

On December 25, updates added 54 journals and deleted 14, for a current total of 21,235 journals (7,365 with fees).

There may be one more very small tranche added around December 30, but it’s possible that one or two changes from December 31 won’t be reflected in this study. (For what it’s worth, six journals have been added and one deleted since 12/25.)

Semi-final notes:

• 136 countries are represented. Indonesia has the most journals (2,431), the United Kingdom second (2,188), Brazil third (1,583) and United States fourth (1,203)–no other countries exceeding 1,000. (Note that these counts include journals that may end up excluded.)’
• As usual, Medicine accounts for the most journals (4,500). Language & Literature is second (1,454) and Education third (1,300).

The standing hashtag in Mastodon will be #goa10, if I remembet…

Finished subject analysis, which was faster than expected.

Also finished parsing APCs for the (first) currency and (first) amount, determining the set of currencies used, determining plausible conversion values for those currencies, and preparing the fee values.

Not including journals added or deleted after 12/14/2024, 7,342 of the journals have fees–and 1,621 of those have more than one currency. Using only the first currency encountered for each journal, there are 46 different currencies (including USD). For 31 of those currencies, I’m using OFX averages for the year through December 14. For another five (not in OFX), I’m using Xrates averages for the first 19 days of December. Finally, for ten other currencies, I’m using either Xe or MSN conversion rates for December 19.

The lowest fee, likely a conversion problem, is $0.0126 per article. Eight others show fees of less than $1, and all might be problems: I’m not in a position to judge. At the other extreme, sixteen journals have fees greater than $6,000 per article, with four of those above $7,000 and two at $8,900. (Both Elsevier.)

I don’t study fee change as part of the study, partly because so many changes are due to currency fluctuation. Informally, however:

• Seventeen journals saw fee increases of more than 300% (some of these possibly due to currency issues)
• Twenty increased by 200 to 300% and 56 by 100% to 199%.
• 124 increased by 50% to 99% and 730 by 10% to 49%.
• The vast majority–5,135 of 7,342–were either unchanged or had minor changes: 1,781 unchanged, 1,518 increasing by less than 10%, and 1,836 decreasing by less than 10%.
• 275 journals had fees fall by 10% to 49.9%, and 13 had drops greater than 50% (but still had fees)

That’s about it for now. I’ll catch up with late changes in either one or two batches. Between December 14 and 22, DOAJ saw 52 new journals and dropped 15–so I’m guessing around 100 new and 30 lost in total.

As of today, here’s what I see:

Gold Open Access 2024: 784 PDF downloads, one paperback.

Diamond OA 2024: 2,700 PDF downloads, no paperbacks.

Dataset: 197 downloads.

Previous year (GOA8/Diamond 2023)

GOA8: 1,155 PDF copies, one paperback

Diamond 2023: 514 PDF downloads, no paperbacks

Dataset: 367 downloads.

GOA7:

1,476 PDF downloads (and one paperback).

Country7: 372 PDF downloads

Dataset: 467 downloads.

Yes, there will be a “GOA10”–or, rather, a Gold Open Access 2025, Diamond OA 2025, and new Figshare dataset.

As always, it’s hard to say just when–harder as I get older and health issues become even less predictable, and also as the number of journals continues to grow. (But also as DOAJ continues to provide more and better data, making my job easier–and I get a little cleverer in handling things.) The full dataset and Gold Open Access 2025 could be ready as early as June 2025 or as late as October 2025, but I’m planning for the former.

Steps so far (while preparing documentation for when/if I stop doing this and someone else is willing to take over):

• Downloaded the first run on December 14; 21,195 journals. [I’ll pick up more–I’m guessing no more than another hundred or so–in the last day or two of the year]
• Did the first matches, yielding 19,378 continuing journals, with 924 journals apparently dropped.
• Started the process of combining old and new data. So far, Titles (49 changes) are done; Countries are done; and I just finished Publishers.
• I’ll start in on Subjects tomorrow: that’s a considerably slower process.
• Then there are fees: a more complicated process, but I have last year’s notes, so probably neither slow nor difficult.

Once fees are complete, I’ll look into the dropped journals, take a sanity break or three, then–in the last week or so of the year–update the base table with newly-added journals (and pull newly-deleted journals). As before, I expect to start data gathering on January 2, possibly even on January 1.

Keeping Up

I’ll post an updates set of stats for usage today or tomorrow.

I plan to do almost-daily quick notes on progress on my Mastodon account, waltcrawford@mastodon.social. and probably weekly updates here. Follow #goa10 on Mastodon to keep up.

Probable Deletion

I will almost certainly drop the attempt to determine how diamond OA journals are funded (a very brief chapter Diamond OA 2024): the more I look at it, the less I trust my own “research” or feel that it’s saying anything useful other than the obvious, which is that nearly all diamond OA journals (97% of the articles) are either published by academia and societies or paid for by academia and societies. If someone with the tools and interest wants to pursue it further, great: I can’t justify spending more time on it given the results of my “research,”