Gray OA and C&I – a quick “progress” report

At about this time, I anticipated being done gathering data for the “Gray OA 2012-2016: Gold OA Beyond DOAJ” project–and taking time off to do a worthwhile November 2016 Cites & Insights, then starting in on the report itself.

I didn’t reckon with the sheer density (and frequent awfulness) of the so-called “independent” journals (many of which are actually from smaller multjournal publishers) and how long it would take to plow through them.

At this point, I’ve checked 540 and have about 365 left to do (more than 100 of the original list turn out to be duplicated within publisher listings). That could take as little as three more days or as much as six days or longer…

And I’ve now realized that, if I want to do a careful discussion of the real volume of articles in possibly-sketchy journals, I’ll have to go back and count articles in “FA” journals–those I regard as failures because they don’t specify the processing charges. And there are more than 1,100 of those…

I still believe the actual possibly-sketchy article volume for 2014 will be far below 420,000–but not as far below as all my partial studies suggested. (Since the dataset I’m using is considerably larger than the one used in the 420K study, a direct comparison may not be feasible.)

Best guess at this point is that the study won’t be done until some time in December…and it could creep out a bit into 2017.

So what about C&I?

At this point, I suspect there will be a combined November/December issue, quite possibly a fairly short one–both because I’m busy with this study (and everyday life) and because I now think it makes sense for the results, which should be Issue 200, to come out as the first 2017 issue, for reasons that will become obvious in The Front essay in the November/December issue.

[Hint: if you currently use the “online version” the proposed change won’t bother you at all…]

Anyway, that’s where things stand. Now back to yet another in a seemingly endless stream of International Journal of…s

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