Walt at Random

Followup: some notes on the next 1,000 journals in my scan of DOAJ; compare to the first 6,000… (I sort by publisher, then journal, because that speeds things up).

A few items do seem interesting.

• Of the 961 journals for which data has been recorded (39 are either unavailable or have malware issues), 430 (45%) have fees.
• Of that 430, I find that five have submission fees rather than processing fees–and six others have both submission and processing fees. 31 others have fees that vary based on article length (I don’t record that if the surcharge begins at 11 pages or higher) or author count. Two have membership or similar fee requirements, and one is questionable (it states boldly that there is no fee, then–in the next paragraph–states the mandated fee but says it’s a gift).
• In 28 of the 430 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: ten of the 40 missing cases have malware (six of the ten from Indonesia); twenty are missing or useless; one requires a login, which makes it not an OA journals; and eight are dead or duplicates (most duplicates are renamed journals, with the old name still appearing.
• In 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.

Timing

So I’ve done 7,000 in (exactly) seven weeks. That leaves 7.128 to go. Will I be done in seven weeks (and a d ay)?

Almost certainly not. Other stuff happens–and the huge chunk of university-based journals is likely to be slow going. I’m hoping to finish the first pass by the end of April–and then there’s a second pass plus a final pass for malware (after journals have had some time to clean up those cases). Then there’s the normalization, data manipulation, table creation and writing the book(s).

GOA4 (2013-2018) appeared on May 4, 2019; that was unusual. GOAJ3 (2012-2017) appeared on May 28, 2018, and even that was earlier than I’d expected. I’ll be delighted if this year’s GOA5 is ready in early June; I won’t be surprised if it takes into July…

Followup: some notes on the first 5,000 journals in my scan of DOAJ; compare to the first 4,000… (I sort by publisher, then journal, because that speeds things up).

Just for fun–and NOT MEANINGFUL at least partly because a number of journals will show larger numbers or have problems cleared up in the “recount” segment–I’m also comparing this to the equivalent portion of the 2019 scan (that is, the same breakpoint for publisher and journal).

A few items do seem interesting.

• Of the 4,629 journals for which data has been recorded (371 are either unavailable or have malware issues), 1,731 (37%) have fees.
• Of that 1,363, I find that 16 have submission fees–and 30 others have both submission and processing fees. 142 others have fees that vary based on article length (I don’t record that if the surcharge begins at 11 pages or higher) or author count.
• In 98 of the 1,731 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: 144 of the 371 for which I don’t yet have data recorded were flagged by Malwarebytes–an uncomfortably high figure. 147 others don’t seem to be there or are unworkable…and eight aren’t OA journals, AFAICT. (Yes, I’m sending DOAJ problems in chunks; yes, I hope we/they can reduce the malware count to a trivial amount as they did last year. The big trouble spots so far are Indonesia with 64 cases, Brazil with 46 and Romania with 15.)
• In 100 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.

Comparisons to 2019

I’m just a bit more than 1/3 of the way done, and things will change, but here’s what I see at the moment:

• At this point last year, I’d done 4,519 journals of which 4,412 were in the analysis (that subgroup included 10 malware cases, three not-OA cases and 43 unavailable/unworkable). That’s almost the same percentage of the whole–35.5% compared to this year’s 35.3%.
• For this portion, the 2018 article total was 290,982 compared to 302,978 this year (but that number should grow a little). For 2017, the numbers are 251,118 and 260,556 respectively.
• If articles were evenly spread among journals, I could project more than 900,000 total 2019 articles (since 35.3% yield 321,346)–but that’s obvious nonsense, since that projection technique yields just under 820,000 total 2018 articles for last year’s count, not the 711,670 articles actually counted. And I’d expect to see the 2019 article count for this year’s pass go up by at least 2,000-4,000. The closest thing to a SWAG for possible totals this time around might be around 786,000–but I’d suggest “somewhere between 750,000 and 850,000” is as close as I’d want to come to an actual estimate.