Turns out it makes sense to split comments on the first download into three parts. This middle part concerns scans and changes that could affect the actual site survey. (The third part, involving the most time and effort, is normalizing country names and adding regions for the added journals, and providing subject and segment names for the added journals.)
Matching continuing journals
This time around, the first match used the DOAJ URLs, newly available last year. At that point, I also determined duplicates based on those URLS (call them DURLs for now).
That first match yielded 16,739 matches after eliminating 12 duplicates.
That left 1,960 new (or unmatched) journals for GOA8 and 535 unmatched GOA7 journals.
A second match using journal URLs yielded three matches. Comparing ISSNs yielded nine matches.
Thus, at this point there are 1,948 new journals and 522 unmatched GOA7 journals.
Checking unmatched journals
Looking at DOAJ’s list of deleted journals (some of which may later have been restored), 277 of the leftover GOA7 could be cleared based on ISSN matches, another 74 based on title matching, leaving 171 mysterious cases–which is about par for the course. (None of those matched new/added journals based on proximate title matching.) There were also 38 deleted journals left over, but as already noted, some or all of these may have been restored.
The baseline continues to be 18,700 journals, of which 16,751 were also in GOA7.
Changes in continuing journals
- It appears that 257 journals changed from no-fee to fee status and 356 changed from fee to no-fee. All of these will be checked directly for fee status and nature during the scan.
- 306 increased fees by more than 10% and 1,600 decreased fees by more than 10%; in both cases, the large currency fluctuations of 2022 may explain many of these changes.
- I defined “major fee changes” as a decrease or increase of both more than $50 and more than 20%. Using that definition, 149 journals had major fee increases while 310 had major fee decreases. All of these will be checked directly during the journal scan.
In all, and accounting for all other cases where fees appear to be more than a straight fixed processing fee (based either on the fee code in GOA7 or the existence of a URL for “other fee” information), it appears that 1,890 journals need to be checked directly for nature, amount, and existence of fees–and 16,610 do not need to be checked.
That’s it for now.
