Time for another GOA6 checkpoint, at 14,400 of 15,676.
Note that, as always, 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 partway through the University of Isfahan. So far, the 2020 article count is 942.685, and that will go up. The 2019 total for this set of journals is 830,018 articles.
Last year, that range of publishers included 12,835 journals, which published 792,068 articles in 2019. So there’s a net gain of 1,562 added journals so far. A million overall articles still seems likely, but not certain.
For this group of 1,600 journals–ignoring the first 12,600–problematic journals include 308 malware case and 75 or so unreachable/unworkable. Yes, that’s a terribly high malware ratio.
Looking more closely at the malware cases for these 1,600 journals, there are ten security-certificate problem, seven ransomware, ten malware, 24 phishing and 256 Trojans.
The problem is mostly Indonesia: 842 of the 1,600 journals in this group are from Indonesia, and 281 of those have malware, mostly at the root URL for a university’s set of journals.
I checked all 14,400 journals scanned so far. Of 764 total malware cases, 481 are from Indonesia. Brazil is a distant second at 121, with smaller clusters from Romania and Spain (and a few cases elsewhere). Yes, Indonesia has more DOAJ-listed journals than any other country, but 481 of Indonesia’s 1,745 (so far) are problematic; Brazil has the second-most journals, and 121 of 1,578 are problematic. (All these figures exclude the remaining 1,276 journals–but only 26 of those are from Indonesia.)
I believe attempts have been made to alert publishers to malware problems. Some may be again this year. This is a continuing problem.
I’d say it’s now nearly certain that the first scan will be done in late April, barring illness or other unexpected events. That would leave some checking and the long rescans. (So far, about 2,200 journals need rechecking; the final number will probably exceed 2,300. Rechecking can be a slow process.)
So no overall target date yet…
