Followup: some notes on the first 2,000 journals–partly to show just how unrepresentative any sample is. Compare this to the first 1,000… This is not at all a representative sample (I sort by publisher, then journal, because that speeds things up).
A few items do seem interesting.
- Of the 1,866 journals for which data has been recorded (134 are either unavailable or have malware issues), 692 have fees. (Easy explanation: BMC’s 360-odd journals are in the second 1,000; almost all have fees.)
- Of that 692, I find that ninehave submission fees–and 19 others have both submission and processing fees. 60 others have fees that vary based on article length (I don’t record that if the surcharge begins at 11 pages or higher).
- In 345 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: 65 of the 134 for which I don’t yet have data recorded were flagged by Malwarebytes–an uncomfortably high figure (but about half of those are in one series). 52 others don’t seem to be there…and two aren’t OA journals, AFAICT
- In 34 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.
