Cites & Insights -- Crawford at Large -- Making It Easy, Making It Hard: A Personal Note on Counting Articles
abernard102@gmail.com 2015-05-12
Summary:
"The primary essay this time around is OA-related
and under the INTERSECTIONS flag—so this oddity
goes in THE FRONT instead.
I’m going to comment on a range of open access
journal publishers and platforms from one particular
and probably peculiar vantage point: mine, as
I’m revisiting some 6,490 journal sites to record the
total number of articles published during 2014. It’s
clear to me that most journal readers and scholars
don’t spend loads of time determining exactly how
many articles a journal publishes, and certainly not
doing that for thousands of journals, so I don’t fault
a publisher or platform for making the process
somewhat clumsy.
But I can offer kudos to those that make it easy,
although that doesn’t necessarily say they’re otherwise
good or bad publishers (or platforms). These
are mostly notes along the way.
I have some thoughts about the 'issue' issue—
that is, if an OA journal doesn’t do print versions,
why does it have issues below the year level? More
particularly, why do some oddball OA journals have
a large number of issues, each of which may have
only one or two (or sometimes none!) articles? But
that’s another, well, issue."