Archive for January, 2019

GOAJ: January 2019 figures

Thursday, January 31st, 2019


eadership figures for GOAJ3 (unfortunately missing most of today, 12/31, and the last day of each month)–and, for now, I’ll keep reporting on GOAJ2 as well.

All links available from the project home page, as always.

GOAJ3: 2012-2017

  • The dataset: 918 views, 129 downloads
  • GOAJ3: 2,699 PDF ebooks + 221 copies of first few chapters (C&I 18.3)
  • Countries: 848 PDF ebooks
  • Subject supplement (C&I 18.4): 281 downloads
  • No paperbacks

GOAJ2: 2011-2016

  • The dataset: 678 views, 127 downloads.
  • GOAJ2: 2,433 PDF ebooks (and two paperbacks), plus 1,384 copies of chapters 1-7 (C&I 17.4)
  • Countries: 1,060 PDF ebooks (no paperbacks)
  • Subject supplement (C&I 17.5): 2,037 copies

Gray OA



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Malware in Gold Open Access Journals, 2018–Part 4: Brazil

Tuesday, January 29th, 2019

See this post: nearly all malware cases have been fixed, including all but four from Brazil.

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Malware in Gold Open Access Journals 2018: Part 3, Romania

Monday, January 21st, 2019

See this post: All remaining Romania malware cases have been fixed.

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Malware in Gold Open Access Journals 2018: Part 2, Malaysia

Sunday, January 20th, 2019

This one’s all good news. That’s why I’m reporting it separately, instead of grouping it with Romania (which I haven’t processed yet).

To wit: in last year’s study, Malaysia had nine instances of malware along with 32 journals reported fully.

This year, with quite a few more journals–63 in all–I encountered no (zero) cases of malware. That isn’t because last year’s infected journals disappeared: they were all there, but none had malware.

So these things can be fixed. Malaysia’s gold OA publishers show that.

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Malware in Gold Open Access Journals 2018: Part 1, Indonesia

Friday, January 18th, 2019

See this post: EVERY malware problem from Indonesia has been fixed.

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GOAJ4: Starting the Deep Dive

Friday, January 4th, 2019

Just a quick note that I’ve completed downloading, crosschecking, and normalization for GOAJ4: Gold Open Access Journals 2013-2018 and have begun the months-long process of gathering data.

The Good News

The starting count is 12,415 journals. That will certainly not be the final count of fully-analyzed journals, given duplicates and other issues. (Will there be more than 12,000 fully analyzable? Based on last year’s records, it may be close…)

The data is in better shape than ever before at this point in the process.

I’ve done the first 350 journals (sorted by publisher, as that allows the most efficiency).

The Bad News

Malware is still a problem, especially (so far) in Indonesia. Efforts to reach out to the mostly-academic publishers to convince them to clean up their software don’t seem to be wholly effective. (Of 11 Indonesian titles scanned so far, five had malware sufficient to block analysis.)

I will probably post a spreadsheet of some sort listing journals with malware, once I’m at least a quarter or half way through. As usual, malware-infected sites will get two more chances, one no earlier than late April 2017.

[A special one-finger salute to WordPress’s new “friendly” editor–if there are no tags on this post, it’s because I can find no way to select them, or to allow comments, once I’ve started adding comments. Bring back the “unfriendly” WYSIWYG editor–oh, and along with it, the ability to edit HTML directly. This is a TERRIBLE “upgrade.”]

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