Followup: some notes on the first 6,000 journals in my scan of DOAJ; compare to the first 5,000… (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 5,555 journals for which data has been recorded (445 are either unavailable or have malware issues), 1,981 (36%) have fees.
- Of that 1,981, I find that 19 have submission fees rather than processing fees–and 36 others have both submission and processing fees. 178 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 118 of the 1,981 cases, I gathered the fee status and amount from the DOAJ record because it was not easy to locate within the journal’s website. (The higher number last time included no-fee cases, where that wasn’t obvious from the site.) This is a much better number!
- Malware is still with us: 177 of the 445 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 ten 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 117 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.
One extra note
This will be the last set of trivial notes covering the first chunk of the scan. If I do more notes, they’ll start with the 6,001st journal–that is, any comparisons would leave out the first 6,000. (But I might see whether anybody’s reading these or whether I’m wasting the 15-20 minutes to write them…)
