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Apologies for the failure to post this earlier. I misidentified it as
spam because the email address was unfamiliar and the Forum receives
so much spam. (The old amsci listserv software has no spam filter and
the "moderator's" role is now to a great extent detecting and deleting
spam!). If any other messages have failed to appear, please alert me
at my regular email address, harnad -- ecs.soton.edu and I will
retrieve and post immediately. I had to re-post this in my own name as
the confirmation number for the original 5 August posting had
expired.)
Stevan Harnad
---------- Forwarded message ----------
From: albert prior <aprior -- contentcomplete.com>
Date: Thu, Aug 13, 2009 at 5:13 AM
Subject: FW: Number of scholarly journals in the world.
To: amsciforum -- gmail.com
Stevan
Re my email below, I have not seen it on the listserv and wondered
whether it had been received/or any reason for not including it?
Thanks
Albert Prior
From: albert prior [mailto:aprior_at_contentcomplete.com]
Sent: 05 August 2009 15:15
To: 'jean.claude.guedon -- umontreal.ca';
'AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG'
Subject: RE: Number of scholarly journals in the world.
Two other sources of information on numbers of journal titles are the
databases maintained at the journals subscription agents and the ISSN
Centre (
http://www.issn.org/)
These databases are maintained to support the subscription orders
received from libraries worldwide. When I worked some years ago for
Swets, one the largest subscription agents, the numbers of titles on
their database was close to 100,000. A number of these would have been
?bibliographic database? titles as opposed to journals and they also
included ?book series? and popular magazines
Swets? library customers were predominantly research and academic
institutions however andtheir title database reflected orders received
from this type of library (as opposed to say public libraries).
I have no up to date information on numbers of titles currently on the
agents? databases, but looking at the latest survey of journal price
increases that Swets publishes annually, the numbers of titles
included in the survey is 71,872. The survey does classify titles by
very broad subject fields.
See:
http://www.swets.com/upload/1637868_672_1225792258001-SPI_Serials_Price_Increase_Report_2009_(31-10-08).pdf
Albert Prior
Content Complete Ltd
www.contentcomplete.com
From: American Scientist Open Access Forum
[mailto:AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG]
On Behalf Of Jean-Claude Guédon
Sent: 04 August 2009 21:07
To: AMERICAN-SCIENTIST-OPEN-ACCESS-FORUM_at_LISTSERVER.SIGMAXI.ORG
Subject: Number of scholarly journals in the world.
In the last few years, various attempts to estimate the number of
journals in the world have been used. Figures ranging from about
14,000 (Michael Mabe) to about 23,000 (Stevan Harnad) have been
regularly brought forth. Few numbers have been used beyond these two
numbers, although they exist.
I have often felt these numbers were much too small.
A new piece of evidence supporting my feeling was recently published
in France: A 721-page list of social science and humanities journals
comprising around 20,000 titles has been compiled. This list is
limited to SSH journals and it relies only on a small number of
sources: Web of Science, Scopus, ERIH and the French list AERES. Lists
such as Redalyc for Latin America have not yet been used. There are
probably long lists of journals to add from India and China, and other
countries. In short, although impressive, this list is still
incomplete and it covers only SHS journals.
The point here is that this list demonstrates the existence of a much
larger set of scholarly and scientific journals than has been used in
our past discussions. This impacts directly on how we evaluate various
approaches to Open Access.
The list can be downloaded at
http://www.cybergeo.eu/index22492.html
I am sure the authors would love receiving further advice and
information to complete their list.
Jean-Claude Guédon
Received on Thu Aug 13 2009 - 10:41:00 BST