First off, an announcement: there will be a GOAJ4: Gold Open Access Journals 2013-2018, and its companion Gold Open Access by Country 2013-2018. The first should be out around July 2019 (health, etc, permitting); the second, a few weeks later. There will also probably be a single-essay issue of Cites & Insights offering a subject supplement. Thanks again to SPARC for continuing to sponsor this. GOAJ4 will cover journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals as of early January 1, 2019 (that is, I’ll download the spreadsheet mid-afternoon on December 31; DOAJ uses UMT.
Second, I have received some feedback on questions I posed in the subject supplement to GOAJ3 and again in two posts here. The bulleted questions follow, with the resolutions as unindented paragraphs. It’s fair to say that one principal I ended up following was to retain consistency unless there was a good reason to change, especially since I plan to include some four-year discussions (that is, how the current state of the DOAJ universe changed over the years(.
- Would it make more sense to categorize journal sizes based on the latest year’s volume, rather than the peak article volume over the six-year period?
I’ll retain peak article volume to categorize journal sizes.
- Does the split between APCLand and OAWorld (used this year in GOAJ3 and this subject supplement, but not in Gold Open Access Journals by Country 2012-2017) make sense, or is it a distraction?
While I will still have a chapter on APCLand and OAWorld and note the differences as appropriate, the Country book will not make the distinction (true for the most recent version) and region chapters will probably focus primarily on overall patterns.
- For GOAJ3 itself, is the Visibility measure useless, or should I either retain it or even expand it to a more granular measure?
This one’s still open. I’ll either drop it or make it more granular. A separate post will be forthcoming.
- For subject segments, should Psychology be lumped into Medicine, and should Anthropology be treated as part of STEM?
After discussions with a number of sources, I’ll keep both subjects in Humanities and Social Sciences.
- Do the publisher categories provide useful information?
I’ll keep them for now.
- For country listings, should I continue to use names as provided in DOAJ or normalize to shorter forms used in Wikipedia and elsewhere—that is, Iran, Taiwan, Russia, Macedonia, Moldova, Bolivia and Venezuela? If so, what forms should I use for the Republic of Korea (South Korea?) and the Democratic Republic of the Congo?
In this case, it seems clearly advantageous to use the shorter and more common forms. Still not sure what to do about the Democratic Republic of the Congo–perhaps Congo (DRC) or Congo, Dem. Rep.? Feedback welcome.
- Should the graph of free and pay articles by year be replaced by or supplemented with a table with the same data as numbers?
No feedback received. I’ll keep the graph for consistency.
- How about commentary? Last year’s subject supplement included my brief comments about what seemed most interesting in each subject’s tables—but the room left by removing commentary means that [the 2012-2017] subject supplement offers more complete country lists, going down to 20 articles for all subjects except Medicine.
I’ll add some commentary.
- Similarly, the last two country-oriented publications have eschewed commentary in order to avoid even longer/larger publications. Would you like to see commentary restored?
I’ll add some commentary, which may make the Country book even larger (but since nobody but me seems to want a print copy, the likely rise to as much as $8 or $9 for a copy may be irrelevant).
- [Added at 4:40 pm] Or should I keep things as much like the 2012-2017 version as possible, to allow direct comparisons?
That’s generally the principal I’ve followed.
