Gold Open Access 6: Data gathering complete | Walt at Random

I just finished the final data-gathering pass–rechecking all problematic journals. I was able to clear 105 additional journals and found 8 more that either had no post-2014 activity or were no longer in DOAJ. That left 639 xm journals and 91 xx journals. I’ve concluded that defective journals that are still defective after six checks over two years, or that had no post-2018 article counts, should not be included in the overall analysis. In all, 492 journals were excluded, leaving 260 malware and 74 unavailable/unworkable journals, all with article counts from DOAJ, retained for the analysis. The big numbers: 15,130 fully analyzed journals, 69.7% of them without fees (“diamond” if you like). 14,175 of those showed 2020 articles (68.8% no-fee), for a total of 1,061,256 articles. The bad news: while the percentage of no-fee journals has stayed about constant at nearly 70%, the percentage of no-fee articles has fallen significantly, from 39% for 2019 articles (in GOA5) to 35.5% for 2020: in essence, nearly all the 2020 growth was in fee-charging journals. [...]