As noted in earlier posts, I’m doing an advance scan (or several) on DOAJ journals to try to clean up subject assignments and publisher category assignments, and to attempt to assign a support/funding source for diamond journals published by OA and toll publishers (rather than societies and universities).
I’ve now done the first two 7,000-journal chunks (another 5,564 left to go: then, in October or November, I’ll do a pass of journals added since early July). Here are some informal and not very meaningful results on the first 14,000 (not too meaningful because some of these no longer publish, a few will have or have already been dropped from DOAJ, and there’s always room for refinement). I did use the set of principles I’ve discussed to assign subjects (perhaps not always consistently). One point: for journals in Dergipark, the Turkish platform that seems to always use a person’s name as publisher, I’ve assumed that if that name is a university scholar and most/all of the editors are university folk, it’s a university journal. (Also: where DOAJ shows no fee on the master table but also shows “other” fees, the fee status may change.)
Subject changes
At this point, 1,014 are new journals; 2,810 subjects have been changed (I’d guess 5% errors, the rest refinements); 10,176 are unchanged.
Publisher categories
Note that quite a few “t” journals are now “o,” and a fair number of “o” journals are either “s” or “u” after visiting the websites.
University/college/research center (u): 7,130, of which 5,685 do not charge fees and 1,445 do.
Societies/associations/government (s): 2,491, of which 1,840 do not charge fees and 651 do.
Open access/independent publishers (0): 2,809, of which 1,061 do not charge fees and 1,793 do.
Traditional publishers (t): 1,563, of which 275 do not charge fees and 1,288 do.
Stopped by virus: seven.
Note that two essentially-all-OA offshoots of traditional publishers (KeAi and Sciendo) account for a lot of the changes.
Support/sponsor codes for 1,291 no-fee “o” and “t” journals
A problem here is that, ignoring the 21 that are already known defunct or where a virus stopped my checking, I have nine codes, far too many to use in tables within Diamond OA 2024. Suggestions on grouping these into a more workable number would be welcome:
- u: Universities and research centers: 525 [obviously this will be one of the categories]
- s: Societies and government: 375 [ditto] –Note that these account for 900 of the 1,291.
- q: Questionable/unknown: 190 — these may get further checks, but usually there’s not much I can do with a few minutes on websites; These are cases where the sponsoring agency just isn’t stated (or doesn’t exist).
- c: Consortium/collective: 102 — cases where there’s a clear group of people or agencies volunteering time and resources to make the journal work.
- f: Foundation, charity or business: 52.
- z: No sponsorship details but has clearly ceased publishing: 19
- i: Initial offer: 15. These the “waived through X date” cases.
- d: Donations invited: 8. These seem to be more dependent on readers sending in money.
- 3: SCOAP3: 2. (There may be others, but these two are flagged as such.)
- V: virus prevented analysis: 2
- x: Subscribe-to-open: 1. I’m SURE there are others but only one clear case. Along with “i” and some portion of “q,” these are the tough one.
So there it is. Thoughts? Suggestions for clumping all those codes? What to do with “q”–and no, sending letters or emails to publishers is not going to happen. Right now, I’m inclined to think of consortia and collectives as informal societies; doing that leaves a very small residue other than “q.”
Now, back to the other 5,564. [I’m not spending a huge amount of time on this: typically 300 journals a day, which can take a couple of hours or a lot less.]
[Added a bit later: If you’re wondering about the remaining 5,564: as always, I sort by publisher and journal–and I’m in the “U”s. Best guess: 4,500 or more of the remaining 5,564 are university journals.
