Gold Open Access 6: Progress Report 3


I’m now just over 30% of the way through the initial journal scan for GOA6 (4,800 of 15,676), 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 now checked halfway through Immanuel Kant Baltic Federal University (Baltic Region); so far, the 2020 article count is 377,436, but that will almost certainly go up slightly. [Does that mean the total will be over a million articles? WAY too early to say.] The 2019 total for this set of journals is 321,513 articles.]

Last year, that range of publishers included 4,398 journals, which published 317,381 articles in 2019. So there’s a net gain of 402 added journals so far.

This year, problematic journals include 174 malware cases–up sharply from the previous report–five that are not OA, and 182 unreachable/unworkable, as well as 25 that had to be reached at new addresses (entirely because DergiPark moved from .gov to .org). These will all be rechecked. Specific problems include 48 404 errors, 33 503 errors, 26 dns issues, 134 trojans, 8 phishing, 17 other malware and 14 security certificate problems.

For what it’s worth, the same range of publishers last year wound up with 20 journals that had malware but could be analyzed, 106 that had to be reached through an alternate address, 69 malware-not-countable cases, and 12unreachable. So malware is even worse this year, unfortunately.

I’m starting a new segment for completed scans, so the next three progress reports will start from scratch as far as problems are concerned. [Yes, it is going reasonably fast at the moment. Thank Hindawi in part: very easy to gather the needed info.]



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