I’m just over a tenth of the way through the initial journal scan for GOA6 (1,600 of 15,677), so it’s a good time for a quick progress report.
Note that, as before, I sort journals by publisher before checking–because many multijournal publishers use the same templates for all journals, making it easier for me to find fee data and do article counts.
For GOA6, that means I’ve checked “Alexandru Ioan Cuza” University of Iași through Casa Cartii de Stiinta Cluj-Napoca (and the next journal’s a different publisher); so far, the 2020 article count is 105,280, but that will almost certainly go up–both because I recheck journals that publish late and malware/problematic cases, but also specifically because all 32 journals from Cambridge University Press failed with 503 errors (!).
Last year, that range of publishers included 1,503 journals, which published 73,537 100,055 articles in 2019 (the earlier figure was actually 2014 totals). It’s hard to make direct comparisons, because journals do change publishers–but so far the rate of newly-added journals is a little lower than I’d expect.
This year, problematic journals include 41 malware cases, one that’s not OA, and 65 unreachable/unworkable (half of them Cambridge). These will all be rechecked. In addition to all those 503 errors, I see 13 404, one 403, 9 SSL certificate problems, 1 (other) database error, 7 DNS failures, 3 cases of fraud, one apparently hijacked case, 9 malware, one phishing, 18 trojans, and a few others.
For what it’s worth, the same range of publishers last year wound up with 7 journals that had malware but could be analyzed, 33 that had to be reached through an alternate address, 13 malware-not-countable cases, and one unreachable. I’d guess we’ll wind up with similar proportions this year.
So does doing one-tenth in the first 12 days of the year mean I’ll finish the first pass at the end of April (that is, around 120 days into the year)? Possible but unpredictable. On one hand, this group includes 300+ BMC journals that could be checked very rapidly (and the Cambridge journals that couldn’t be checked at all); on the other, it’s hard to avoid some doomscrolling while waiting to see how civil war is avoided or dealt with. So we shall see: no predictions until I’m at least three-quarters finished!
