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.
