GOA7: Progress Report, First Quarter

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:

2020201920182017
GOA7289,125238,532216,973197,314
GOA6274,902229,221212,892186,547

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,

2 Responses to “GOA7: Progress Report, First Quarter”

  1. I wonder if there is a point at which number of journals will actually fall? The scenario could involve continued consolidation by the big companies, or attrition in niche journals without critical mass or funding. A group of us are redoing the OA Manifesto for the Interpretive Social Sciences and Humanities, https://doi.org/10.21428/6ffd8432.a7503356 and the academic – led journals like mine are certainly under threat from indexing systems, academic hiring and promotion norms in the higher education sector, and – the elephant in the room – not much support from Plan S which will eventually require us to adopt machine readability/xml, and proper archiving on commercial sites like Portico.

  2. Walt Crawford says:

    I think DOAJ is still adding journals that hadn’t applied (or that have improved their practices), and we also see a few dozen journals either disappear or stop posting articles every year; it would be hard to say. There are, of course, still thousands of journals and “journals” that aren’t in DOAJ: ROAD lists more than three times as many resources, including more than 50,000 journals.

    I do not comment on Plan S, one way or another, and don’t plan to start.