While still low on energy, it’s coming back. This was a very strong week–but partly for poor reasons. I scanned 1,300 journals and completed the bulk of Indonesian universities–and Indonesia continues to have a serious malware problem. To wit: at the end of Week 13 there were 232 “xm” malware journals and 216 “xm2”–malware last year as well. Now, there are 299 “xm”–and an awful 351 xm2. But it could have been worse: One university with roughly 50 “xm” journals in a row last year (as is commonly the case, the infection is at a root level) apparently corrected the problem this year: All 50 are clean. So 351 is awful, but 401 would be even worse.
At the moment, there are 2,169 journals left to scan (last week’s figure was off by The Usual One: the last row is one high, because there’s a heading row). That suggests that the first scan should be finished around April 22 (cross fingers). But there are currently 2,275 journals left to recheck, which could take another two weeks (unless I opt not to recheck 405 xm2/xx2 journals, which I’m inclined to do). Actually, I’ll probably spend a week on cleanup and then recheck, to allow one more week for late-published 2022 issues to show up. (That’s the remaining 1,500-odd journals ignoring xm/xx).
The numbers
1,300 more journals checked.
The overall counts at this point:
16,600 journals checked, of which
14,584 published 1,311,198 articles in 2022 and
15,420 published 1,223,884 articles in 2021.
The rest of the numbers:
- Fee versus diamond/no-fee: 5,241 journals with fees, 11,359 without.
- New vs. continuing: 1,908 newly-added, 14,692 continuing (including all of the “x”status below).
- Status code:
14,555 “a”–clean.
384 “bi”– inactive (no articles since at least 2020).
69 “bx”–done but at a different URL.
97 “xd”–defunct, no articles since at least 2016.
299 “xm”–malware (but not last year).
51 “xn”–not an OA journal (including those removed this year but before I got to them) and ones suddenly requiring a login.
720 “xx”–unreachable or unworkable.
And the two oddities:
351 “xm2”–malware, also malware last year
54 “xx2”–unreachable or unworkable, as was true last year. - Ease of article counting:
“d” 8,768: easiest, taken directly from DOAJ (sometimes with 2022 count modified)
“w” 962: easy, journal website provides direct numbers at either volume or issue level.
“f” 5,004: middling; numbers calculated using Find function for constants (e.g. “doi.” or “pdf”)
“c” 517: slowest; articles counted manually. - Why the counts of “ease of…” don’t add up to total journals counted: all xd and bi cases, not quite all other non-a cases. If I couldn’t count them at all…
And I’d still appreciate feedback on the Diamond OA idea. Anyone out there?
