JURN is now five years old, having launched in early alpha form with just 951 titles on 3rd February 2009. The current headline total of 4,690 titles works out at an average growth of around 750 titles per year, although in the calendar year of 2013 this had slowed to indexing around 350 new English language titles. However, the 350 figure was from my simple tallying from the “new titles added” blog posts — and this blog doesn’t report additions of non-English titles.
Actually, JURN’s headline total is probably an undercounting, since JURN can index nearly all French and Spanish language journals with a few “catch all” URLs for services such as Redalyc, Raco, Dialnet, and Revues. Also JStage in Japan. As their totals in humanities and arts steadily mount up, uncounted by me, so the total number of journals indexed by JURN automatically grows. The same is true of JURN’s use of single wildcard URLs that index all articles on a university’s dedicated open journal system (such as: http://ojs.library.dal.ca/*/article/). These two factors mean that, if I were able to do a complete recount from scratch, the real headline figure for JURN would probably be well over 5,000 arts and humanities titles.
The centralised nature of science and biomedical meant that thousands of open journals in these areas could be added with little effort, and so they were experimentally included in JURN in late 2013 — although their numbers were not added to the headline total of journals indexed.
The Directory of over 3,000 titles published in English continues to grow.
JURN continues to be robustly maintained and repaired.
Overall usage of JURN continues to grow, although it would be nice to have a publicity professional or two to help more people become aware of the service.
