I’ve scanned 8,600 journals so far–just less than one-half of them all. (There are 8,702 left to do.)
At a similar point in last year’s scan (arranged by publisher and journal), there were 7,358 journals. I show 1,314 newly-added journals so far, so that suggests about 72 removed or missing. [Journals change publishers and thus locations in the spreadsheet, so removed/added figures can change either way.]
Newly-added journals aren’t mostly brand-new, so the 2020-2017 comparative figures are reasonable:
| 2020 | 2019 | 2018 | 2017 | |
| GOA7 | 730,902 | 576,015 | 499,897 | 425,273 |
| GOA6 | 707,832 | 566,270 | 487,810 | 410.182 |
The 2021 article count to date is 870,382: A couple of publishers in the second quarter show rapid article growth in 2021. Note that the 2017-2020 counts for GOA7 are all probably low, but not by a lot.
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 ..161 inactive journals (no articles since 2019); 48 dead/duplicate titles; 243 journals with malware; 4 items I don’t consider to be OA journals; and 402 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.)
I’m still ahead of schedule, and of course hope to continue that, but things can happen. There will be an immediate slowdown over the next few days as I deal with other stuff–arranging papers, gathering tax receipts, weeding (real weeding), etc. I’ll probably do updates every two or three days for a week or so, as I’ll be doing less journal scanning each day.
Still no anticipated finish date (barring major family health issues, early May is possible for the first pass) or total article count (but I’d guess somewhere between 1.3 and 1.4 million).
