The new OOIR List. Currently with 849 journals in its List, these being from Web of Science’s SSCI journals in social studies. 119 of the titles on the OOIR List are flagged as Open Access, though a good number of these are greyed-out and not tracked (because they don’t bother to also submit to CrossRef).

Evidently Web of Science only covers 119 such OA titles, which means its OA coverage in this area has hardly budged since 2015 when Web of Science was only showing 116 titles in OA in social studies.

Within that very limited range, what OOIR is trying to do with its titles seems interesting, by providing an aggregated ‘latest’ / ‘trending’ / ‘active journals’ dashboard. It’s neatly presented, and there are also per-journal metrics over on the Statistics tab.

Apparently the service is focussed on recent papers, and “OOIR does not link to papers published before Nov 2018”. A previous RSS-feed based version, for politics and diplomacy, was titled Observatory of International Relations (OIR). But this has now been shut in favour of OOIR.

I guess the question now is, would it be possible to build something bigger and similar and slightly shinier, that could provide a public tracking-dashboard for all such material of use to those interested in timely new research on politics, diplomacy and related matters? Zak Kallenborn has some ideas on that in his recent article “Academic Paywalls Harm National Security”.