So far, 10,625 journals have been checked, leaving 10,583 to go: As close to halfway as we’ll get. Total articles for 2024: 977.487; for 2023, 944,456. Of these, 4,286 have fees, and 6,339 don’t (diamond OA). 1,065 are newly-added and 9,560 are ongoing. 1,569 will be rechecked, including most of these special cases (except bi and xd):
- Inactive (bi): 247
- Expired (xd): 137
- Malware (xm): 405
- Not OA (xn): 41–note that this includes journals dropped from DOAJ.
- Unavailable/unworkable (xx): 425
Another milestone of sorts: the 2024 article count is already higher than the total 2019 article count in the ninth study (Gold Open Access Journals 2019-2023), which was 924,613.
It’s likely that daily totals will be even more erratic and lower for the next few (?) days, for various reasons. While we’re halfway through by count, I suspect the second half will take longer: I’ll be pleased if the first pass is done in mid-May.
Two oddities have been encountered, both of which suggest sloppy coding:
- A few–maybe a couple dozen–scattered journals show up as “grayed out,” with a medium-dark or very dark overlay making the journal’s home page essentially unreadable (and wholly unresponsive). It may be the case that clearing the cache and all cookies “fixes” this, and I’ll try that for the second pass.
- All or nearly all of the Nature Publishing “npj” journals work just fine in Firefox, but don’t respond at all in Chrome (the page is visible but static). [I use Chrome as a default browser only during this project, to get the fastest/easiest translate; normally, Firefox is my browser of choice).
Since Nature’s journals all report article-level metadata promptly to DOAJ, that problem is an annoyance. The other problems are killers: if using a “cleared” browser doesn’t fix them I’ll have no choice but to call the journals “xx”–unavailable or unworkable. In no case should any of this be happening, to be sure. And let’s not mention the single journal that required FIVE SCREENS of Capcha “click on screens with cars” before it decided I wasn’t a robot.
