I’ve scanned 13,000 journals so far–just over three-quarters of them all. (There are 4,302 left to do. Stopping at 12,900 would have left 4,402, just over one-quarter.)
At a similar point in last year’s scan (arranged by publisher and journal), there were 11,386 journals. I show 1,790 newly-added journals so far, so that suggests about 176 removed or missing. [Journals change publishers and thus locations in the spreadsheet, so removed/added figures can change either way.]
The 2021 article count to date is 1,069,316. The last quarter of journals tends to have many fewer articles: there were just under 157,000 2020 articles in the remaining group. So it’s fair to assume that there will be more than 1.2 million 2021 articles, but maybe not a lot more–I’ll stick with 1.3 to 1.4 million as a vague guesstimate.
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 251 inactive (no articles since 2019 or earlier, but at least one since 2015); 15 found at different URLs (there will be a lot more of these in the second pass); 66 dead or duplicate; 379 malware cases; seven that I don’t believe are OA journals; and 856 that were unreachable or unworkable. I would anticipate clearing most of the unreachable/unworkable–and so far, cross fingers, malware cases aren’t as numerous last year (but still precisely 379 cases too high, since there’s no excuse for any of them). My optimistic target was to reach 12,900 or 13,000 by the end of March, and I’ve done better than that. Tomorrow will be devoted to other things, and there’s still enormous uncertainty about outside factors–but if things continue to go well, I could start the second pass before May.
