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.”]
