Just a quick informal update on my “gray OA” research, having achieved two milestones:
- Getting past row 655 of the publisher spreadsheet, the Publisher Who Shall Not Be Named (actually four imprints). It didn’t show up as 700+ full-OA journals when I checked it out (at least not from the APC table, the easiest way to deal with it), but as 618 journals, 54 of which were hybrid “OA” and 19 empty, leaving 545 with at least one article between January 2012 and June 30, 2016. Articles (using the publisher’s DOI scheme, which leaves out editorials in most cases): 9,041 for the first half of 2016; 14,198 for 2015; 10,798 (in 337 journals) for 2014. That’s about 20% of all the active journals for the first 655 rows and 15% of the 2016 articles, but only 13% of active-in-2014 journals and 10% of 2014 articles.
- Getting to row 701 (that is, 700 publishers of 1,027 total).
Roughly, the first 700 show 2,718 journals with at least one 2016 article, for slightly under 60,000 articles January-June–and 2,723 journals with at least one 2014 article, for slightly under 105,000 articles for the full year.
It is, of course, possible that the remaining 327 publishers and 1,000+ “independent” journals will provide the 315,000 articles for 2014 you’d need to get to the frequently-flouted peer-reviewed number of articles in 2014 in “predatory” journals–but it’s a tad unlikely. (This also assumes that all gray OA is predatory, despite the lack of any evidence at all in 85+% of cases. That’s another discussion.)
Now for the rest of them…