The following 27 titles were available on the Hindawi website in 2015 but are not found on the publisher’s website as of 2016. As of May 2015, Hindawi listed about 408 active titles. This is a substantial journal attrition rate of 7% in less than a year. In theory, the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) eliminates journals no longer active (more on DOAJ versus actual titles below). On surface, this seems like a good idea – but what about the many authors whose works become less visible because DOAJ has de-listed their journal? I do not think that this is a good practice for OA. DOAJ should have a means of indicating that a journal is inactive and continue to make journals and their content available and visible whenever possible. Until this is sorted out, this possibility is one of the reasons I argue that authors should always self-archive their work as open access, even when publishing in open access journals, and why funding agencies and universities should insist on archiving in open access policy.

Journals listed in Hindawi APC site in 2015 no longer visible as of February 2016

More about DOAJ versus Hindawi OA journal lists

Our 2015 dataset (downloadable from the OA APC dataverse, described in MDPI’s Data journal) included 538 Hindawi titles. 130 of these were the then-obsolete ISRN series of journals. 538 – 130 = 408 journals, that’s how I calculated the total number of journals for 2015. The ISRN series, which has been obsolete for some time, was still included in the February 2016 DOAJ metadata. 28 titles are listed as current on the Hindawi website but were not indexed in DOAJ as of February 2016, of these 18 were on the Hindawi website with an APC as of 2015.

Cite as:

Morrison, H. (2016). 27 Hindawi titles active in 2015, not found in 2016. Sustaining the Knowledge Commons / Soutenir Les Savoirs Communs. Retrieved from https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2016/05/03/27-hindawi-titles-active-in-2015-not-found-in-2016/