Cites & Insights 15.1, January 2015, was published two weeks ago, featuring the “third half” of my vast-but-incomplete survey of gold OA in 2011-2014, along with some additional notes related to gold OA.
“Going for the gold: OA journals in 2014: any interest?”–asking whether a coherent, well-organized look at the overall state of OA journals in 2014 (or, really, 2011-2014), based on an even larger survey of the journals, done as a paperback book, would be of any interest–appeared the next day, December 3, 2014. Essentially the same text appeared as one of the shorter pieces in the “third half” essay.
As of this morning (at 5 a.m., when the daily statistics run for month-to-day happens), December 16, 2014, C&I 15.1 is doing OK in terms of readership: 1,355 downloads to date (1,168 of the print-oriented two-column version, 187 of the 6×9″ single-column version). Those are strong numbers; I’d like to think the issue’s having some mild impact.
As of this morning, total non-spam responses to the other post (and to the piece in C&I) are a little less strong. 1,355 less strong, to be exact. (Lots of spamments, but that happens any time I turn comments on.)
That’s a shame, but it’s also reality.
Meanwhile, I’m now a little more than halfway in scanning the remaining 2,200-odd journals, which are now down to 1,800-odd as I remove journals where there’s not enough English in the interface for me to determine whether they have article processing charges and how their issue archives work. That is: I have 1,010 journals that I’ve been able to record information on, with 800-odd to go, but I imagine another 100+ will disappear in that process.
A word to OA publishers who are trying to offer an English interface without actually doing any work: Having an English flag (either literally a flag or a pull-down list option) is really sort of pointless if all it does is change the OJS menu headings to English, with all the text linked from them still in the primary language of the journal. Cute, but pointless.
But at least better than the journals hosting malware…and I think I have one of you to “thank” for spending most of a day last week recovering from a nasty little Trojan disguised as a Flash update. I saw a second attempt this week, but the combination of anti-crap software I’m running flagged it immediately.
Oh, just as a sidebar, here are some year-to-November-30* figures for OA-related essays in Volume 14:
- April 2014, 14:4 (The Sad Case of Jeffrey Beall and another essay): 2,781 two-column plus 3,393 single-column (a rare case in which the single-column outdid the two-column), for a total of 6,174, a big number for C&I: by far the largest 2014 download count for any issue of C&I (that’s out of some 176,000 total downloads through November 30, although as noted in the footnote below that’s missing 11 days, the last day of each month).
- May 2014, 14:5 (The So-Called Sting and another essay): 1,690 two-column plus 1,283 single-column, for a total of 2,973, also a very good number.
- July 2014, 14:7 (Journals, “Journals” and Wannabes): 1,839 two-column plus 1,042 single column, for a total of 2,881, which is very good, especially noting that the window is getting smaller.
- October/November 2014, 14:10 (Journals and “Journals”: Taking a Deeper Look): 817 two-column plus 239 single-column for a total of 1,056. Not bad for a relatively brief period.
- December 2014, 14:11 (Journals and “Journals” Part 2): 998 two-column plus 456 single-column, for a total of 1,454, which is pretty good given that it came out on November 2, so that’s one month’s readership.
The three Journals and “Journals” issues show 96, 27, and 88 additional downloads for December 1-15, respectively.
*Technically, November 29: because of how the statistics run, I never actually see the figures for the final day of a given month.
Update December 18, 2014: Comments now turned off. The question of whether or not to write a Publish-on-Demand paperback based on all of this has been rendered moot, in a way that will serve libraries quite well, I believe.
