Two unconnected mini-posts

August 1st, 2024

How much?

A recent issue of The Absolute Bose is a directory of speakers and cables from companies that TAB approves of. After going through it, I was tempted to tabulate some of the extreme prices, for example:

  • How and  many companies sell speaker systems costing more than $50,000? How about $100,000? Or  gasp, $500,000. (After all, TAB last year ran a glowing multipage review for a >$500K set of speakers based on…the editor flying to the manufacturer and listening to it for a couple of hours, the kind of careful testing for which I treasure TAB…)
  • How many companies sell speaker cable pairs costing more than $1,000? $10,000? Would you believe $50,000?
  • Or, for that matter, one-meter interconnects (what you’d use to connect, for example, a CD player to your preamp or amp). How many over $1,000? $5,000? $10,000? $25,000?

I didn’t do it because I found it so discouraging. (And a reminder: Since hearing is what your mind makes of it, sometimes influenced by what actually hits your ears, I fully accept that TAB’s supertalented reviewers hear the differences they claim to hear.)

I can assume you that the answers to all those questions are non-zero and in some cases astonishingly large.

Print science fiction and a possible sad goodbye

I read way too much online as is–two newspapers on my tablet over breakfast (and sometimes over lunch), all the posts and stories and stuff here. I prefer print for books and magazines, and have habitually read science fiction with lunch, from one of what used to be called “the Big Three” (Asimov’s, Analog, F&SF)–except that none of them are all that big anymore and, after all being monthly (or 13/year for a while), they’re all six issues/year to cut postage costs.

I couldn’t keep up with all three (I also read SF books, to be sure), so dropped Analog, given that the editor at the time seem to have lost sight of the fact that a good SF story should, first and foremost, be a good story.

That may have changed. I guess I’ll soon find out.

The January/February 2024 Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction (F&SF), or was it the December/January issue, was very late. I asked about it. It finally showed up in March, now relabeled “Winter 2024,” although we were assured the magazine still came out six times a year.

Since then? Crickets. And now, I can’t even ask, because the website won’t accept feedback.

Is F&SF dead? Are they looking for a savior? I have no idea. If F&SF is dead, I’ll miss it.

Meanwhile, I’ve picked up Analog again. We shall see.

Gold/Diamond OA usage stats

July 31st, 2024

As of today, here’s what I see:

Gold Open Access 2024: 101 PDF downloads, one paperback.

Diamond OA 2024: 2,500 PDF downloads, no paperbacks. (Without at least looking at Gold Open Access 2024, Diamond OA 2024 readers are lacking some context, but…

Dataset: 98 downloads.

Previous year (GOA8/Diamond 2023)

GOA8: 968 PDF copies, one paperback

Diamond 2023: 452 PDF downloads, no paperbacks

Dataset: 269 downloads.

GOA7:

1,476 PDF downloads (and one paperback).

Country7: 372 PDF downloads

Dataset: 389 downloads.

Gold Open Access Project: Usage Notes

June 20th, 2024

The first notes for GOA24/DIA24 (“GOA9”), and the first note since February.

Gold Open Access 2024 (GOA9)

59 pdf ebooks and no paperbacks.

Dataset: 67 downloads, as far as I can tell (and 68 views at Figshare)

Diamond OA 2024

The big surprise (the power of Peter Suber and Mastodon?): 2,256 PDF ebooks. No paperbacks.

Gold Open Access 8

948 PDF ebooks, one print paperback (plus, of course, the copy I purchased)

Dataset: 264 downloads (and 664 views at Figshare)

Diamond OA 2023

435 PDF ebooks, no paperbacks.

Diamond OA 2024 is now available

June 18th, 2024

I’m delighted to announce that Diamond OA 2024: The World of No-Fee Open Access Publishing is now available as a free PDF or a nominally-priced ($8 US, as low as GBP6.25 or as high as CAD$13) trade paperback.

And that’s it for GOA9: I’ll provide stats in the next week or two and periodically through the rest of the year, and look at GOA10 in a few months. The bad news: diamond OA seems to be slipping somewhat. The good: still more than 400,000 articles in 2023.

Staples and prices

May 24th, 2024

I ran out of staples for my Swingline stapler. After replacing the strip with the last strip in the box, I needed to order more.

So, wondering what the price might be (since it’s probably been a decade or so since I last purchased a box of staples), I went to Amazon (we needed some other stuff anyway). I was shocked.

The standard Swingline-brand staples came 210 staples to a strip, 24 strips to a box: so 5,000 staples. 3.3oz., but free shipping anyway.

The price? $2.14. That’s two dollars and fourteen cents. For what will probably be enough staples for my lifetime (not for *a* lifetime, but…).

Of course, they come in a simple (and wholly recyclable) thin cardboard box, not the fancy plastic box the last bunch came in (that bunch must have been 4,000 staples or fewer–I couldn’t fit all the strips into the old box).

Oh, you can get by for less: A pack of 50,000 Amazon Basics staples (10 5,000-staple packs) costs $16.45.

Or I could get fancy and get “premium” Swingline-brand staples, but those cost (gasp) $2.68 for 5,000.

I wonder: just how much did these staples cost ten or twenty years ago? I’m guessing a lot more, especially factoring in inflation.

I also wonder how they can be so cheap. (Office Depot offered a 5-pack of 5,000-each-pack Swinglines for $12.99/pack, which is, what, $2.60/5,000. Their house brand is $9.79 on sale, less than $2/5,000.)

Anyway, that’s my outrageous pricing story for today.

Gold Open Access 2024 now available as book and dataset

May 23rd, 2024

Gold Open Access 2024: Articles in Journals 2019-2023 (GOA9) is now available as an $11.50 color trade paperback or free PDF download. The dataset is also available at figshare (although it won’t currently preview) or directly from waltcrawford.name. For all links, go to https://waltcrawford.name/goaj.html

Diamond OA 2024: The World of No-Fee Open Access Publishing should be ready in July or very late June.

GOA9: Progress Report

May 16th, 2024

I’m reworking on Gold Open Access 2024, and my best guess is that it will be complete some time this month–most likely between May 24 and May 31. “Complete” means that the paperback is available from Lulu, the free PDF is available on my website, and the dataset is on Figshare.

A best guess is just that.

If you’ve been using the preliminary dataset: there will be changes–around 30 additional rows, and one odd change that does not affect article counts.

Best guess for Diamond OA 2024, barring unusual crises, is three to five weeks after Gold Open Access 2024 is complete–maybe more, almost certainly not less. So very late June or early July, if crossing my fingers doesn’t make typing too slow.

GOA9: Preliminary dataset now available

May 2nd, 2024

A preliminary version of the GOA9 dataset is now available at at https://waltcrawford.name/g9_prefig.xlsx. I believe this dataset will be identical to the final g9 dataset on Figshare, unless some surprises turn up during preparation of derivative data and the book.

The dataset proper includes 19,392 journals; the exclusions page has another 877 (including the “xd” journals). For more notes, see https://walt.lishost.org/2024/04/goa9-end-of-data-gathering/

[Note: crosschecking to prepare derivative data showed two keyboarding errors; they have been corrected and the preliminary dataset has been replaced.]

Do note that Malwarebytes seems to have restored its blanket categorization of all .name domains as suspicious…and I have no idea when or whether they’ll (once again) refine that overbroad warning.

GOA9: End of data gathering

April 30th, 2024

I’ve finished the smallest but most annoying (and slowest) part of data gathering: rechecking the xm2/xx2 journals. It wasn’t entirely worthless–53 were now a (normal), five were now inactive (bi), one was now xj (no longer in DOAJ), and one was now dead/defunct (xd).

Unfortunately, the malware problem is much worse than last year: 335 xm2 (compared to 260 last year) and, sigh, 313 xm (compared to 190 last year. It’s mostly Indonesia: almost precisely 2/3 of all malware cases (439 out of 648), including 157 of 313 new cases and 282 of 335 continuing (xm2). Next highest is Brazil with 42 new and five continuing, then Italy, Russia and Spain with a dozen each and Venezuela with 11. Nearly all Indonesia cases are in universities: either they’re not aware that they’re carrying malware (almost always in entry menus for Oa journals, not individual journals) or they just don’t care.

DOAJ has also been more actively removing journals this year than in the first four months of 2023: 249 journals compared to 41 last year. And there were more “not OA journals”–but only a dozen, mostly because when checked twice, they required login. (There are also two or three that are encyclopedias, not journals, and one that I find entirely mystifying–a journal devoted to one author that has neither dates nor issues but lists articles alphabetically; I’m unwilling to read each and every PDF to see what the dates are, if there are any.)

How often did I find a new URL (by searching on journal title + ISSN) that appeared to work properly as an entry point for the journal? 359, I believe.

The Big Numbers

In all, and barring cleanup during processing, 19,622 journals are fully analyzed, although 230 of those have no articles later than 2018 (xd). Those journals published 1,440,494 articles in 2023 and 1,445,733 in 2022–up just basely from last year and the first time there’s been a decline in overall articles (probably because a number of journals are very late with issue processing). NOTE: I’ve now moved xd journals to Excluded, where they belong. Doesn’t affect the article numbers, but does cut the overall number of fully-analyzed journals to 19,392.

18,430 journals are “normal” (a) and 510 had no 2022 or 2023 articles when checked (bi). The former is around 850 more journals than last year; the latter, 87 more.

Special Cases

Cases that will appear in regular tables:

  • bi (inactive): 510
  • xm (malware or certificate problems): 313
  • xx (unavailable or unworkable): 139

Cases that will not be in regular tables and will be on the Exclusions page of the dataset:

  • xd (dead/defunct): 230
  • xj (removed from DOAJ): 249
  • xm2 (continuing malware): 335
  • xn (not an OA journal or uncountable): 12
  • xx2 (continued unavailable/unworkable): 51

Next steps

It appears that I will make a preliminary version of the dataset available on my own website, probably on Thursday or Friday. It’s possible–but unlikely–that there will be slight changes in the final dataset, published when Gold Open Access 2024 is published.

Preliminary data now available

The preliminary data is now available at https://waltcrawford.name/g9_prefig.xlsx. I believe this dataset will be identical to the final g9 dataset on figshare, unless some surprises turn up during preparation of derivative data and the book.

Do be aware that Malwarebytes seems to think that all .name domains are potentially problematic. I’ve notified them that this isn’t so, and just as they fixed it previously I hope they’ll do so again–I’m not prepared to rebuild all of my files on another domain.

And beyond…

Now I’ll check data for conformity, add derived data (e.g., revenue figures for journals, size, growth…) and make sure the templates are working.

Then comes the “writing”–mostly generating tables and figures, but with some text as well. [Modified to allow for other priorities:] The book and formal data posting should be ready in the spring (that is, before the end of June).

Then, Diamond OA 2024, covering the 13,139 diamond OA journals that aren’t exclusions (almost precisely 2/3, but exactly 66.9605545%), mostly focusing on country-by-country. Figure another three to five weeks for that.

 

GOA9: End of Pass 2 (start of Pass 2b)

April 27th, 2024

I’ve completed Pass 2, problematic journals and those where it seemed plausible that a new 2023 issue might emerge. Along the way, I also retested 35 of the xm2/xx2 journals, and–to my surprise–found five that could be resurrected looking for other URLs. So, given that there are only 456 of these, I’ll check them one more time.

At this point–omitting those 456–there are 19,563 included journals and 250 excluded journals. The 250 exclusions account for only 438 articles in 2023, which is hardly surprising (the total peaked at 8,511 in 2020). Nearly all of the exclusions so far, 239 of them, are journals removed from DOAJ since 1/1/2024; the other 11 are not OA journals–four encyclopedias and seven journals that now require login with no other obvious means of access (checked twice).

The 19,563 account for 1,441,817 articles in 2023 and 1,443,423 in 2022. 333 of them are at different URLs than the ones that appear in DOAJ. 6,470 have fees and 13,093–just over two-thirds–do not.

Special cases

  • bi [inactive: no articles since 2021]: 521
  • xd [dead: no articles since 2018]: 229
  • Note that many bi and xd have been continued under other names
  • xm [malware, but not in 2023]: 313
  • xx [unavailable or unworkable, but not in 2023]: 138

Yes, there are still far too many malware cases…especially given the xm2 still to be rechecked.

Now, on to the mercifully brief final pass. Then, some time off, and time to massage data, add derived data, and write the book(s).

Oh, and you’ve still got a few days to chime in on https://walt.lishost.org/2024/04/goa9-should-i-post-a-preliminary-dataset/