I’ve started gathering data for GOA5–articles from 2014 through 2019–and have reached the first milestone, the first 1,000 journals. This is not at all a representative sample (I sort by publisher, then journal, because that speeds things up)–to suggest that 7% of a wildly heterogeneous set of journals is representative would be to commit the kind of error that only true academics can get away with.
But a few items do seem interesting.
- Of the 946 journals for which data has been recorded (54 are either unavailable or have malware issues), 273 have fees.
- Of that 273, I find that seven have submission fees–and 19 others have both submission and processing fees. 46 others have fees that vary based on article length (I don’t record that if the surcharge begins at 11 pages or higher).
- In 221 of the 946 cases, I gathered the fee status and amount from the DOAJ record because it was not easy to locate within the journal’s website.
- Malware is still with us: 23 of the 54 for which I don’t yet have data recorded were flagged by Malwarebytes. 29 others don’t seem to be there…
- In 21 cases where I do have data, the URL in DOAJ did not yield the website but a journal title search in Chrome did yield the website.
That’s it for now. Nothing earth-shattering. Are submission fees a growing trend? It’s way too early to say.
