Walt at Random

No sales pitch this time. If you think this is valuable information, maybe your library should buy it. Meanwhile:

Questionable Journals by Country

I’m working on a big OA roundup for Cites & Insights, and was noting a ScienceNews article that began with a frequently-stated false statement: that most OA journals charge APCs. But I noted that the author was Indian, and took a look:

For India (as represented by DOAJ-listed journals I regarded as serious), he’s right: a slight majority of the 438 journals do charge APCs (53.7%).

That’s readily available in the book, in Chapter 6.

But I also thought: what about DOAJ-listed journals that I graded “C” (and so did not include in the main analysis)?

Turns out that almost a third of those 312 journals are published in India—it’s second only to the United States (but the United States publishes 996 serious OA journals, compared to India’s 438).

Here’s a table showing the countries that publish more than two journals I graded “C” (for hidden APCs or flat-out lies or impossible peer review turnaround or…):

Here’s the comparable table for serious journals (grades A and B), including countries with 100 or more such journals (this is a portion of Table 6.1)

Other Excluded Journals

What about the 777 journals that I excluded for other reasons (see the book for details, Table 2.1 and accompanying text)?

Here’s a table showing the countries with five or more such journals:

I wouldn’t attempt to conclude much from this list, since it’s such a hodgepodge of reasons for not fully analyzing the journals. Some aren’t OA as I define it (or are all conference proceedings), some were too difficult to count (mostly because they’re full-issue PDFs), a whole bunch were unreachable, I’ve already posted about the malware-laden ones, and so on…

Status Update

Not much to say here: total so far 10 paperback copies, three PDF ebook copies; three total copies in the last month.

This entry was posted on Thursday, December 17th, 2015 at 5:22 pm and is filed under open access. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. Both comments and pings are currently closed.