I’ve started prep work for GOA8, doing the first metadata downloads yesterday and dealing with currency conversion today, in the process dealing with fee issues for almost all of the journals. (I’ll do another download after midnight GMT on January 1–that is, around 4 pm here on 12/31–and deal with what’s likely to be a few dozen additional titles.)
Over the next week or two I’ll be combining data from GOA7 and the new download, adding subjects to the newly-added journals, and otherwise normalizing data; I’ll do another post when that’s done. Meanwhile, here’s what I see.
Date and Basic Counts
The exported DOAJ metadata has a timestamp of 20221214_2235–that is, 10:35 pm GMT on December 14, 2022. It includes 18,700 records. The add/delete spreadsheet shows 1,385 journals added and 391 removed during 2022. [Edit: 18,699, of course.]
Of those 18,699 journals, 5,836 show APCs and another 187 indicate other fees; 12,677 have no fees.
Of the 5,836 with APCs, 417 also show other fees.
Currency Conversions
I parsed the APC fields (which combine numbers and currency code and can contain multiple fees) to get the first fee and currency combination. That yielded 44 currencies. I entered average 2022 conversion rates for most currencies from ofx.com; December (first half) averages for a few others ;and December 15 conversion for those currencies not available in other sources.
2022 was a strong year for the US Dollar. 14 other currencies sank 10% or more against the dollar, but only three sank more than 20% (Turkish lira, Argentine peso, Ukrainian hryvnia). On the other hand, three currencies increased significantly (more than 0.7%) against the dollar, and I suspect that one of those–CNY, the Chinese yuan, which rose nearly 800%–is a case of confusion between China’s offshore and domestic currency. (The Russian ruble gained 18.8%, but it’s erratic in any case.)
Looking at the results, I found a large handful (28, all but one CNY) where the converted rate seemed suspiciously high and a few very low fees where a zero may be missing. I marked these all for further checking (as I did for all journals with “other” fees).
As of now:
I see 12,677 with no fee (but if the GOA7 data shows a fee, I’ll recheck); 6,023 with simple fees (but if the GOA7 shows anything but a simple fee, I’ll recheck); and 652 where a recheck is clearly involved. Compared to checking every journal’s website for fees, that’s an obvious time reduction–and seems likely to yield better results.
