Walt at Random

I’ve scanned 4,320 journals so far–just less than one-quarter of them all. (There are 12,983 left to do.)

At a similar point in last year’s scan (arranged by publisher and journal), there were 3,752 journals. I show 699 newly-added journals so far, so that suggests about 131 removed or missing.

Newly-added journals aren’t mostly brand-new, so the 2020-2017 comparative figures are reasonable:

The 2021 article count to date is 312,150.

I’ve been providing daily summaries of journals counted, total to date, total with 2021 articles, and 2021 article count on my Twitter account–not difficult to find! (I’m boring: pretty much walt crawford everywhere…)

I’ve also been providing weekly summaries including counts of problematic or special cases, which so far include 70 inactive journals (no articles since 2019); 20 dead/duplicate titles; 130 journals with malware; 3 items I don’t consider to be OA journals; and 176 that couldn’t be reached for one reason or another. (Most of the latter count will probably be rectified in the follow-up pass, including the journals left behind when DergiPark in Turkey changed domains and stopped forwarding.)

Yes, I’m slightly ahead of “schedule.” It’s possible that I could finish the first scan around the end of April, but it could take much longer both because of varying degrees of difficulty and because of real-life interruptions, the scheduled (taxes, for example) and the unscheduled (family health situations). I have found some slightly faster ways to do some things, which is encouraging,

As of January 5, 2022, as far as I can tell:

GOA6:

• Overall report: 1,303 PDF copies (no books other than my copy)
• Countries: 134 PDF (no books)
• Dataset: 358 views, 62 downloads

GOA5:

• Overall report: 910 copies (two books)
• Countries: 211 copies (no books)
• Dataset: 946 views, 148 downloads

The first note is that Walt at Random is working again…

Second, if you want to track daily progress, follow me on Twitter. Maybe not every day, but most days. And I probably won’t have loads of other tweets while the scan is going on!

Third, I’ll get back to the stats for GOA6 in a few days.

Finally, a note on why the public dataset and primary book might not happen until September (almost-worst case scenario):

Counting backwards, it takes about a month to massage the data and prepare the book once all data gathering is complete. (It’s that fast largely because the templates are already ready to go–for most tables and graphs in most chapters, preparing the tables and graphs is literally loading the appropriate data into the first page of a spreadsheet and doing one Refresh on each other page. You gotta love pivot tables, specifically the fact that a named source can be everything in a column, and that’s dynamic.) So that takes me to as late as late August to finish data gathering.

Rechecking–going back to problematic journals and ones where it seems likely that more 2021 issues/articles will have been posted between 1/1/22 and 4/1/22–is likely to take up to a month. That takes me to late July.

I’m hoping that the date will move up to mid-June or even mid-May–but life intervenes. (To reach mid-June I have to average 100 journals a day, every day. To reach mid-May I need to average 1,000 journals a week. The former is possible. The latter is increasingly unlikely.)

Fact is, I’m getting older and probably slowing down. And there are more personal and family health issues over time, issues that require time. And, well, you can’t keep doing the scans all day without lots of breaks, even when there are no other issues. At least I can’t.

I thought for a while before proposing to do this seventh version. But decided to do it.

Miracles can happen–some health issues could subside, malware and other problematic cases could subside, and many more journals could fall into the dead-easy category. Based on the first 400+ journals, I’m not expecting loads of miracles.

OK, so this has also been a break… Back to the scan and afternoon coffee break.