After thinking about it and running a full-scale test run, I’ve made a decision that should do two things:
- Improve the quality of APC/fee information, by eliminating possible transcription errors and by using 2022 fee/APC levels rather than those of early 2023.
- Save time–potentially a lot of time–thus making it possible that GOA8 will be done this Spring, or at least early summer. Not certain, but posslb.e
The changes
Around December 14, I’ll download the DOAJ metadata as usual. But this time, I’ll start out by doing the following:
- Determine currency usage.
- Immediately lookup exchange rates (using Forex annual-median where feasible, shorter-term where not).
- Prepare stripped fee amount and currency columns in DOAJ metadata, and perform the conversions right away.
- Populate the GOA8 master spreadsheet with those values, and other values as appropriate, to wit:
- St8 (new status) is n (no fee) if there is no fee, f (fee) if there is one, BUT if the DOAJ metadata shows the possibility of other fees (they now have a field for that), then x.
- Fee code will start at “d” (derived from DOAJ) in all cases.
Since I retain the fee (call it Fee7), fee code (Fc7), and status (St7) from GOA7, it’s an easy matter to change St8 to “x” whenever Fc7 is any code indicating something other than a standard fee (e.g., submission, b9th submission and processing, membership, variable fee).
While going through the journals, I’ll look for fee information in the journal websites if the St8 is “x”–and populate the fee code appropriately. If not, I’ll just use the downloaded/converted fee.
A trial run suggests that I’ll need to look for fee info within journal websites in about 1,300 journals (out of more than 17,000).
Note that this should make overall fee info *more* accurate because I’ll be using 2022 fee levels, not 2023. And this process essentially removes the possibility of transcription errors.
So: target for completion is still “whenever,” but a considerably earlier “whenever.”
