Gold/Diamond Open Access 2025: Gearing Up

Yes, there will be a “GOA10”–or, rather, a Gold Open Access 2025, Diamond OA 2025, and new Figshare dataset.

As always, it’s hard to say just when–harder as I get older and health issues become even less predictable, and also as the number of journals continues to grow. (But also as DOAJ continues to provide more and better data, making my job easier–and I get a little cleverer in handling things.) The full dataset and Gold Open Access 2025 could be ready as early as June 2025 or as late as October 2025, but I’m planning for the former.

Steps so far (while preparing documentation for when/if I stop doing this and someone else is willing to take over):

• Downloaded the first run on December 14; 21,195 journals. [I’ll pick up more–I’m guessing no more than another hundred or so–in the last day or two of the year]
• Did the first matches, yielding 19,378 continuing journals, with 924 journals apparently dropped.
• Started the process of combining old and new data. So far, Titles (49 changes) are done; Countries are done; and I just finished Publishers.
• I’ll start in on Subjects tomorrow: that’s a considerably slower process.
• Then there are fees: a more complicated process, but I have last year’s notes, so probably neither slow nor difficult.

Once fees are complete, I’ll look into the dropped journals, take a sanity break or three, then–in the last week or so of the year–update the base table with newly-added journals (and pull newly-deleted journals). As before, I expect to start data gathering on January 2, possibly even on January 1.

Keeping Up

I’ll post an updates set of stats for usage today or tomorrow.

I plan to do almost-daily quick notes on progress on my Mastodon account, waltcrawford@mastodon.social. and probably weekly updates here. Follow #goa10 on Mastodon to keep up.

Probable Deletion

I will almost certainly drop the attempt to determine how diamond OA journals are funded (a very brief chapter Diamond OA 2024): the more I look at it, the less I trust my own “research” or feel that it’s saying anything useful other than the obvious, which is that nearly all diamond OA journals (97% of the articles) are either published by academia and societies or paid for by academia and societies. If someone with the tools and interest wants to pursue it further, great: I can’t justify spending more time on it given the results of my “research,”

Yes, there will be a “GOA10”–or, rather, a Gold Open Access 2025, Diamond OA 2025, and new Figshare dataset. As always, it’s hard to say just when–harder as I get older and health issues become even less predictable, and also as the number of journals continues to grow. (But also as DOAJ continues to provide  Read More

Walt at Random