Purely an incidental comment…
I used to write a fair amount about open access–in particular about how it related to libraries.
Enough so that in 2010 I self-published Open Access and Libraries: Essays from Cites & Insights 2001-2009. (That link is to the $17.50 paperback; the PDF ebook is absolutely free.)
The paperback is 513 pages long and includes 33 essays and an introduction. (It’s incomplete: it only includes whole essays on OA, not discussions of OA within other essays.)
I put it together partly because I’d sort of given up writing about OA at that point, partly because I didn’t think I was being heard at all, partly because more knowledgeable people and those with much larger voices were covering it so extensively.
Indeed, there were no essays specifically about OA in Cites & Insights during 2010, 2011 or 2012–although one could certainly argue that one or both of the essays in the December 2012 issue were pretty closely related to OA.
On the other hand, I did produce a compact book for ALA Editions in 2011, Open Access: What You Need to Know Now. It’s still available; I believe it’s still useful.
Then came 2013
In January 2013, I devoted most of the issue (90%) to “Catching Up with Open Access.”
In February 2013, I devoted most of the issue (>90%) to the second half of that essay.
And stuff kept happening that I thought was worth tagging for discussion…enough stuff so that I devoted nearly all (98+%) of the June 2013 issue to “Hot Times for Open Access.”
Adding it up
Just for fun (and because I could do it in three or four minutes), I thought I’d see what those essays–the ones in December 2012, January 2013, February 2013 and June 2013–would amount to if I was doing a second volume of Open Access and Libraries.
Three hundred and forty pages. Well, that’s without copyfitting. With copyfitting, it would probably come out to as little as 330-334 pages. Plus an introduction, table of contents and (maybe?) an index (but an index would be at least 10-12 pages).
In other words, by at least one measure, I’ve devoted almost precisely two-thirds as much space to open access since December 2012 as I did from 2001 through 2009. It comes out to about 126,000 words.
I don’t (currently) plan on doing such a second volume, partly because I don’t (currently) plan on abandoning OA coverage as a small voice grumbling in the wilderness, but even now it would be a fairly thick paperback.
211
That’s the number of items currently tagged “OA” in Diigo. Which means it’s all items that I have not yet written about. Dunno when I will. One significant chunk of that gets me a pleasant enough earworm of a particular Scott Joplin rag…
No deeper significance.
