Walt at Random

20,294? That’s how many journals I’ll be scanning for Gold Open Access 2024 (and Diamond Open Access 2024): it’s the number in the Directory of Open Access Journals at the end of 2023. (OK, so missing the last 100 minutes of the year…)

Roughly 67%–two-thirds–are Diamond, that is, don’t have fees. Roughly 390 journals were removed from DOAJ during the year. Leaving out a few high-volume journals from two high-volume publishers that were removed for failing to meet DOAJ standards, the removed journals didn’t publish that much: omitting the top ten, fewer than 28,000 articles in 2022 and fewer than 23,000 in 2021.

Now (well, tomorrow or Tuesday) I start counting. For frequent updates, follow me on Mastodon or track #goa9. I’ll post less frequent updates here.

I’ll post most updates (perhaps daily while I’m gathering data) on Mastodon with the hashtag #goa9.

Those updates will not appear here.

More significant milestones may appear here and on Mastodon with the hashtag #openaccess.

I’m waltctawford and mastodon.social is my home iteration.

In case it’s not obvious: I am no longer on deadbird , and don’t use fb  for much except friends & relatives. And, of course, come January 2 I won’t be spending a lot of time on any social network, as there are more than 20,000 journals to visit.

I had originally planned to download the DOAJ dataset again in early November, but wound up doing this on December 1, 2023. The dataset included 20,345 journals, of which 19,565 were in the July 1 version. That meant 780 to have countries normalized, regions, subjects and segments assigned, and publisher and support categories established.

With a change in methodology based on the idea that most new OA journals come from publishers that already have OA journals, even though other events kept me from starting work on these until December 3, I was able to complete the scans by December 7, 2023.

As of now, the dataset includes roughly 2,120 newly-added journals and 3,262 with changes in key fields. 6,611 have fees; 13,733 do not. Of the 1,624 non-fee journals that are not from societies/governments or universities and the like, some 640 are sponsored by universities (and the like), 525 by societies/government, the rest through various means–including 235 where the funding source is unclear.

Plans at this point, changed a bit since the last post:

Journal data

• I plan to download data again on December 26, 2027 when I anticipate having fewer than 100 new journals. That’s also when I’ll look at currency conversion rates and calculate journal fees. Based on recent experience, there should be more than enough time to handle this by December 30.
• The final download will be after 4 pm PST on December 31–that is. midnight 1/1/2024 UMT. I’d expect no more than a handful of added journals.
• With any luck, the new master dataset will be ready for the first pass on January 2, 2024.

Anticipated testing timeline and unknowns

• At this point, I anticipate losing a lot less time to medical treatments (assuming the prostate cancer stays in remission, which seems reasonably likely), but considerably more time exercising. On the whole, and given the usual slowing with age, I’d expect to get slightly  more done each day than in 2023.
• Assuming around 20,500 journals to be scanned, I’ll stick with the “sometime in spring” projection–optimistically in mid-May, pessimistically in late June. Which places the new dataset and books in early summer or, optimistically, VERY late spring.

Changes

• Changes made last year will continue.
• The new dataset and books will carry five years of data (2019-2023) rather than six, partly so there are fewer tables with very small text for very large numbers.

I’ll probably do weekly or fortnightly updates in this blog and more-or-less daily quick notes at Mastodon. I am completely gone from the deadbird site.

Comments always welcome, and I still need suggestions as to how to group support/funding sources for Diamond OA 2024.

Gold Open Access 8

• PDF downloads: 358
• Dataset:61 downloads.
• Books: none.

Diamond OA 2023

• PDF downloads: 206
• Books: none

Gold Open Access 7

• PDF downloads: 1,353
• Print version: 1 copy
• Dataset: 75 downloads, 479 views
• Country book: 505 downloads, no print

First off: Barring major health or other problems, there will be a Gold OA 2024/Diamond OA 2024 set of studies and accompanying spreadsheet.

Here are some notes on a preliminary pass cleaning up some metadata on most of the dataset: https://walt.lishost.org/2023/09/toward-gold-open-access-2024-diamond-oa-2024-refreshing-subjects-and-support/

Schedule?

• In November, I’ll do a second subject/support/country scan for newly-added journals.
• In mid-December, I’ll do a near-final cleanup and prepare the dataset.
• January 1, I’ll do final data additions and should be able to start the scan shortly thereafter.
• The schedule largely depends on personal and family health issues: This year was bad–half a day lost Monday-Friday for seven weeks, and general exhaustion a bit beyond that–but I was still able to finish data gathering in mid-May, do the Gold OA report on June 5, and do the Diamond OA report on June 21.
• There will be significantly more journals this time around, and once again I’m aiming for “some time in the summer” for both reports–with the hope of dates comparable to this year.

Help?

Please follow the link already provided. I could use suggestions on how to cluster support/sponsorship categories for the Diamond OA report.

Unknowns?

I’m old. (78, if you’re wondering.) Health issues are always possible. I’m expecting some PT this fall and possibly into next year. I don’t currently believe it will significantly impact the schedule.

And I enjoy doing this and regard it as worthwhile, so I’ll do the best I can.

And, of course, it would be lovely to see one or two print copies of each of the books sold (from which I make essentially no revenue–under $0.50)–but I won’t be holding my breath.

I just completed the pass through DOAJ journals downloaded July 11, 2023 (19,564 of them) to recheck publisher category, refresh/refine subject assignments, and refresh/assign funding source codes for diamond OA journals from publishers other than societies and universities.

All of this is preliminary and subject to further change, of course, but this is a good start. As of today, there are roughly 300 more journals in DOAJ; in November or early December, I’ll do a similar pass of newly-added journals. Note that “no-fee” and “fee” are based on a single column in the DOAJ metadata; some “no-fee” journals have fees other than APCs  and will change to fee in the end. (Best guess: a few hundred.)

Here’s what I see as of now:

Subject changes

• 3,262 subjects were changed.
• 1,342 subjects for newly-added journals.
• 14,960 checked and unchanged.

Publisher category

• u [Universities, colleges, research centers]: 12,030, of which 9,817 are no-fee and 2,213 have fees.
• o [Open/not otherwise categorized]: 3,186, of which 1,273 are no-fee and 1,913 have fees.
• s [Societies, govt]: 2,536, of which 1,876 are no-fee and 660 have fees.
• t [Traditional]: 1,804, of which 283 are no-fee and 1,521 have fees. Note that–although there are 1,342 newly-added journals–this is a much lower number than in GOA8, as I concluded that some publishers tagged as traditional were really almost entirely open (and quite a few “o” journals turned out to be university or society journals).
• V [blocked by virus]: four.

Support category for the 1,556 no-fee open and traditional journals

• u [University and academia]: 610
• s [Society, govt]: 502 – thus, 1,112 of the 1,156 (71%) are funded from traditi0nal sources.
• q [Questionable/unknown]: 225. Possible that later investigation can reduce this, which is mostly journals with no stated funding source.
• c [Collective/consortium]: 106. Includes journals clearly volunteer-run with an apparent intenti0n to stay that way. (Also includes a few supported by multiple institutions, but most of these are in u or s
• f [Foundation, charity or business]: 62.
• z [Defunct]: 19 journals that have clearly ceased publishing.
• i [Initial offer]: 17 journals where the no-fee statement suggests that there will be a fee in the future.
• d [Donations solicited]: 8 journals that explicitly invite donations.
• 3 [SCOAP3]: two.
• x [subscribe-to-open]: two clear cases
• V [Virus blocked]: two.
• a [Advertising revenue]: one.

One issue to be resolved before Diamond OA 2024 is done: how to group all but u & s into two or three manageable clusters (or in some cases treat them as u or s).

Subjects

I’m not sure a list of current subject assignments is useful, but given that there are quite a few more journals, it may be worth noting subjects that have fewer journals in the current list than in GOA8, usually because of refinements/reassignments (and in a few cases clear error).

In alphabetic order, these are biology, earth sciences, education, history, sociology, technology. For education and history, this is partly an explicit shift so that history *of* x or education *about* x is classified as X.

Gold Open Access 8

• PDF downloads: 189
• Dataset:57 downloads.
• Books: none.

Diamond OA 2023

• PDF downloads: 138
• Books: none

Gold Open Access 7

• PDF downloads: 1,184
• Print version: 1 copy
• Dataset: 423 downloads [typo last month]
• Country book: 249 downloads, no print