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Archive for 2015

The semi-obligatory “I Still Read Books” post

Wednesday, December 30th, 2015

I started keeping a spreadsheet of books I’d read three or four years ago (OK: January 6, 2011–make that “five years ago”) because I was starting to use the excellent local public library a lot more and, being old, didn’t want to accidentally pick up the same book twice.

As a side-effect, the spreadsheet lets me know how many books I’ve actually read each year.

My target is 39. To wit: The library’s check-out period is four weeks; I always take out three books (one “general” fiction, one nonfiction, one alternating between mystery and fantasy/science fiction). So: 13 four-week periods times three books.

This year, as last year, I managed to pass the target by a comfortable margin: 62(!) books read, assuming I don’t finish the current book before January 1. Or, rather, looking at the spreadsheet more carefully, I started 62 books and finished 59. Three (The Book of Lost Books, The Bite in the Apple, and William Safire’s Take My Word for It) I abandoned partway through.

So: Here are the books I thoroughly enjoyed, giving them full honors:

Thief of Time	Terry Pratchett
Pale Kings and Princes	Robert B. Parker
Night Watch	Terry Pratchett
Monstrous Regiment	Terry Pratchett
The Lake, The River & The Other Lake	Steve Amick
This Case Is Gonna Kill Me	Phillipa Bornikova
Hugger Mugger	Robert B. Parker
The Pleasure of My Company	Steve Martin
An Object of Beauty	Steve Martin
Potshot	Robert Parker
The Professional	Robert B. Parker
Rough Weather	Robert B. Parker
1634: The Ram Rebellion	Eric Flint
Night Passage	Robert B. Parker
Paper Doll	Robert B. Parker
A Blink of the Screen	Terry Pratchett
The Bromeliad Trilogy	Terry Pratchett

and a few others that I enjoyed, but didn’t rate quite as high (A- rather than the A for those above)

Waiter Rant	The Waiter
The Truth	Terry Pratchett
Turtle Recall: the Discworld Companion	Terry Pratchett & S. Briggs
Crimson Joy	Robert Parker
Box Office Poison	Phillipa Bornikova
1632	Eric Flint
1633	Eric Flint & David Weber
1634: The Bavarian Crisis	Eric Flint & Virginia DeMarce
Now & Then	Robert B. Parker
1634: The Baltic War	Eric Flint & David Weber
Ring of Fire	Eric Flint
Big Trouble	Dave Barry
1635: The Eastern Front	Eric Flint
True History of the Kelly Gang	Peter Carey
Widow’s Walk	Robert B. Parker

For those of you saying “Crawford’s got no Serious Literary Taste, he’s in there reading them Robert B. Parker and Terry Pratchett and Eric Flint genre pieces of crap,” I can only say phbttb. I’ve been a sucker for Pratchett since I first encountered Discworld (on a cruise ship, as it happens), and I’m pretty sure I’ve read all the adult Discworld novels and a couple of the nonfiction works (I’ll seek out the rest of the juveniles, and while I’m too damn old to start rereading stuff, it’s hard to let go of the Discworld folks). I’ve always been a fan of Robert B. Parker’s books, except for the fact that they’re so fluid and fast-moving that I finish one in at most three brief evening reading sessions. I’ve been captured by the 1632 alternate history told from the ground up, and that’s the way it is. I’m sure there are a few “serious” books in there. Somewhere.

Posted in Books and publishing | 3 Comments »

Something positive for the holidays: A shout-out to OfficeDepot/OfficeMax

Thursday, December 24th, 2015

As a few of you on LSW Slack may know, we (well, my wife, but I’m spending my time helping her cope with it) have been having more than our share of ComputerWoes this holiday:

Her 4-year-old Toshiba Satellite, which she was a couple of months away from replacing, suddenly died when she tried to wake it up from sleep mode.
She wants to stick with a 17″ screen (this is her *only* computer) and there aren’t a lot of good choices from brands we semi-trust. A clearance Toshiba model was sold out at our local OfficeMax. We went to Fry’s; they had a more expensive Toshiba that seemed pretty nice. We bought it (and Office 2016–and now realize we probably should have gone for the multiuser Office 365 subscription instead, but that’s a different story).
First good OD/OM news: Clark, the computer tech at our local OfficeMax was able to recover all the data and bookmarks from the broken Toshiba’s hard disk for a very fair price ($50; since OD/OM also had a great sale on 32GB USB 3.0 flash drives from the brand we both prefer, Sandisk–$9.99, which really is a great price, I purchased a couple of them and gave the tech one to use for the data).
But…two days later–day before yesterday–the new Toshiba wouldn’t boot up–power light, wifi light, nothing else. This is after she’d pretty much restored and loaded everything, and was starting to get stuff done again.
Took it back to Fry’s. They were actually willing to do a “brain transplant”–swap the hard disk into another Toshiba of the same model–but, tada, they’d run out of that Toshiba model. We could drive a long way to another store or… The only other suitable 17″ notebook was a Dell Inspiron: smaller hard disk, less RAM, but an Intel i3 CPU rather than an AMD; same price. So…we made the exchange.
ANYWAY: The other OfficeDepot/OfficeMax thing that feels like a seasonal miracle, even though I didn’t need it: Seeing just how much faster USB 3.0 is (and both of our machines–I have an 8-month-old Toshiba Satellite, also a 17″ screen, replacing a 7-year-old Gateway notebook that’s still operational but overheating–now have USB 3.0 ports), we both think we’d like to use USB 3.0 flash drives for backup and have extras. The store was out of the sale units (the sale ends Sunday), but what the heck, if I purchased four of them from OfficeDepot.com (for $39.96 plus tax), they’d throw in free delivery.
I ordered the flash drives yesterday afternoon, around 3 p.m. Figured they’d arrive midweek next week, the usual 3-5 business days. That’s fine: we don’t need them yet.
Half an hour ago–20 hours after I ordered the flash drives with free delivery and no rush anything–there was a knock on the door and a delivery person handed me the box. Which apparently shipped last night at 7:30 p.m. from a Fremont OD warehouse.

A long and odd story, but the shoutout here is: Really? 20-hour FREE delivery when I didn’t even request it? I don’t expect it to happen again, but hey, good for OfficeDepot/OfficeMax

(I’d always been an OD shopper–Mountain View has a big and very good OD store that was in walking distance of our old house–but it’s OfficeMax in Livermore, and since they’re both really OfficeDepot now, we’ll manage. And their tech support person, Clark, really is great. He looked at my 7-yr-old Gateway to see whether it was plausible to replace the noisy fan and keep it as a backup computer. He concluded that the fan was a symptom of overheating, showed me the whole situation, said probably not worth trying to fix for such an old machine…and didn’t charge anything. Now, if only they had the Toshiba 17″ notebooks in stock…)

So: the closest to a Christmas present we’re likely to get (our family doesn’t do presents for adults, a wise decision made decades ago), and always good to deal with user-friendly companies.

And to all…happy holidays, whichever you do or don’t celebrate.

Posted in Stuff | Comments Closed

It’s not just (some) librarians who seem professionally suicidal

Tuesday, December 22nd, 2015

Reading an article in today’s San Francisco Chronicle (via Kindle) about a magazine that started up three years ago and may not have money enough to produce any more issues.

With, but of course, an early paragraph about the curiosity of starting a new print magazine when (paraphrasing) magazines and newspapers are shutting down EVERY DAY.

Except…

Newspapers aren’t shutting down “every day.” After most afternoon newspapers (and, unfortunately, most competitive newspapers in most cities) shut down, there have been very few shutdowns–and, interestingly, ad revenue seems to have bottomed out and started rising again.

As for magazines, old ones do disappear (not every day, but every so often), as they have throughout the history of magazines. And new ones do appear (not every day, but almost) as they have throughout the history of magazines. Mr. Magazine (Prof. Samir Husni, who specifically tracks magazines available on newsstands) pretty consistently finds more startups than shutdowns every year. Yes, newsstand sales have continued to fall–but for most magazines (except People and a few others), newsstand sales are pretty much irrelevant. There’s a reason Nature Conservancy, World Wildlife Fund and ACLU have all introduced print magazines in the past few years–they work in a way few other media do. (It’s also true that there are a lot fewer multimillion-circulation magazines than there were years ago–but many more niche magazines. I think that’s a good thing, but then I never was much for the multimillion-circulation magazines. Except, I guess, for the biggest circulation magazine of them all: AARP The Magazine, which is steadily growing and now close to 24 million.)

Then, halfway through the article, we get to the “AHA!” moment, after blaming The Death Of All Print for the upstart magazine’s problems:

It doesn’t accept advertising, because that would impair the purity of the vision.
The online version not only doesn’t require subscriptions, it doesn’t accept them, because…

The founder’s pretty much upfront about wanting the magazine to be funded as somebody’s charity. That’s nice, but a failure to maintain that funding model has nothing whatsoever to do with The Death Of Magazines.

Meanwhile, Happy Holidays–all 27 of them during this season. For that matter, for a few of you, keep that colander shiny!

Posted in Media | Comments Closed

The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014: additional info

Thursday, December 17th, 2015

No sales pitch this time. If you think this is valuable information, maybe your library should buy it. Meanwhile:

Questionable Journals by Country

I’m working on a big OA roundup for Cites & Insights, and was noting a ScienceNews article that began with a frequently-stated false statement: that most OA journals charge APCs. But I noted that the author was Indian, and took a look:

For India (as represented by DOAJ-listed journals I regarded as serious), he’s right: a slight majority of the 438 journals do charge APCs (53.7%).

That’s readily available in the book, in Chapter 6.

But I also thought: what about DOAJ-listed journals that I graded “C” (and so did not include in the main analysis)?

Turns out that almost a third of those 312 journals are published in India—it’s second only to the United States (but the United States publishes 996 serious OA journals, compared to India’s 438).

Here’s a table showing the countries that publish more than two journals I graded “C” (for hidden APCs or flat-out lies or impossible peer review turnaround or…):

Country	Count
United States	118
India	100
Pakistan	21
Iran, Islamic Republic of	12
United Kingdom	7
Italy	5
Canada	4
South Korea	4
Brazil	3
Spain	3

Here’s the comparable table for serious journals (grades A and B), including countries with 100 or more such journals (this is a portion of Table 6.1)

Country	Journals
United States	996
Brazil	929
United Kingdom	649
Spain	517
Egypt	493
India	438
Germany	315
Romania	285
Italy	277
Iran, Islamic Republic of	269
Turkey	260
Poland	258
Canada	254
Colombia	242
Switzerland	216
France	166
Argentina	146
Mexico	146
Chile	138
Indonesia	136
New Zealand	115
Australia	111
Russian Federation	100

Other Excluded Journals

What about the 777 journals that I excluded for other reasons (see the book for details, Table 2.1 and accompanying text)?

Here’s a table showing the countries with five or more such journals:

Country	Count
United States	130
Brazil	53
Spain	51
India	49
Germany	36
Turkey	36
Egypt	31
Romania	31
Russian Federation	27
Italy	26
United Kingdom	23
Colombia	22
Iran, Islamic Republic of	17
China	16
France	16
Argentina	13
Venezuela, Bolivarian Republic of	13
Mexico	11
Pakistan	10
Chile	9
Portugal	9
Ukraine	9
Canada	8
Poland	8
Switzerland	8
Indonesia	7
Serbia	7
Austria	6
Australia	5
Cuba	5

I wouldn’t attempt to conclude much from this list, since it’s such a hodgepodge of reasons for not fully analyzing the journals. Some aren’t OA as I define it (or are all conference proceedings), some were too difficult to count (mostly because they’re full-issue PDFs), a whole bunch were unreachable, I’ve already posted about the malware-laden ones, and so on…

Status Update

Not much to say here: total so far 10 paperback copies, three PDF ebook copies; three total copies in the last month.

Posted in open access | Comments Closed

Mystery Collection, Disc 46

Wednesday, December 9th, 2015

Murder Once Removed, 1971 (TV movie), color. Charles Dubin (dir.), John Forsythe, Richard Kiley, Reta Shaw, Joseph Campanella, Barbara Bain, Wendell Burton. 1:14.

A junkie vet (Burton) who’s trying to kick the stuff and go to college, a doctor (Forsythe) who’s helping out—and who’s got the hots for the wife ( Bain) of a local businessman (Kiley), and a police detective (Campanella, of course). Those are the key players—well, those and the doctor’s nurse (Shaw) and the nurse’s dog (uncredited), who howls whenever there’s been a death.

See, the wife and the doctor are seeing each other—innocently, so far, but the doctor wants to change that—and the businessman’s looked into the doctor’s past in another town, where his mother-in-law died of a heart attack and, not too much later, his wife died of a heart attack, leaving him the money to come back home and buy out his father’s medical practice. The businessman—a patient of the doctor, as are all the other characters—believes the doctor did it and tells him so, thinking he’s taken precautions to assure that the same fate doesn’t befall him.

That’s the setup. The rest involves the doctor murdering the businessman (but not by inducing a heart attack), his careful framing of the young vet, the detective being suspicious of it all being too pat…and a little stage acting that results in the doctor confessing all.

Except…well, there are two more twists in the last five minutes of the flick (which has all the characteristics of a TV movie). I won’t give them away, but will note that one of them makes an earlier scene seem entirely phony and implausible. Incidentally, the plot summary on IMDb is wrong: the wife did not plot the murder with the doctor. At least not directly…

When I write the review, I don’t know whether it’s a TV movie, but can’t explain this one any other way. Good cast, decent movie. $1.25.

Hollywood Man, 1976, color. Jack Starrett (dir.), William Smith Jennifer Billingsley, Ray Girardin, Jude Farese. 1:37 [1:24]

This seems to be a no-budget movie about making a no-budget biker movie and the perils of getting most of your absurdly inadequate financing from someone you know is out to screw you, and who can claim all of your assets if the flick doesn’t get made rapidly. (Really: the obviously-connected “financier” turns them down, hands them another guy’s card and says “If I was you, I wouldn’t call him.” Sounds like a sure winner to me! On the other hand, that was the dramatic highlight of the portion of the film I watched.)It was written by four of the “stars” with assistance from the cast and crew; it was produced by two of the “stars.” (OK, maybe William Smith really was a star at some point, famous for Grave of the Vampire and Nam’s Angels, two other flicks I’ll probably never see.) It seems to be mostly a bunch of badly-filmed stunts done by people who don’t much give a damn.

Within ten minutes, I realized that I couldn’t tell which group of mumbling lowlife asshats were the good guys and which group were the bad guys and that I didn’t care one way or the other. Within 20 minutes, I recognized that this was one of those just plain incompetent movies, not one that’s so incompetent—but with such good intentions—that it’s amusing (e.g., Plan 9 from Outer Space).

Apparently, the stupidity escalates to beatings, murders and rapes further in the movie; I didn’t encounter that (well, maybe one murder: it was hard to tell, frankly) because the movie was such crap that I didn’t get that far. Maybe it’s because I’m now officially Old (at 70): With only 25-30 years to go, life really is too short for this garbage.

I never look at IMDB reviews until I’ve written mine—but this “review,” from Ray Girardin, may say all that needs to be said about the flick:

Hi, I’m Ray Girardin. I wrote “Stoker” (which became “Hollywood Man”) along with my friend Bill Smith in 1976. We wrote it mainly so we could do a movie together, and it worked out. He played the lead, Rafe Stoker, and I played the heavy, Harvey. There were problems along the way, as there always are with low-budget films, but we enjoyed doing it. If you’ve seen it, I’d welcome your comments, pro or con.

I stopped watching about 20 minutes in, and have no plans to resume. If you’re so inclined, you can apparently watch it for free on Youtube or download it from the Internet Archive. As the first financier might say, “If you’re smart, you won’t.” $0.

Dominique, 1979, color. Michael Anderson (dir.), Cliff Robertson, Jean Simmons, Jenny Agutter, Simon Ward. 1:40 (1:35)

The wealthy (but nervous) wife of a stockbroker (who seems to need money, although they live in a mansion with several staff members) witnesses some odd incidents—she’s apparently being gaslighted by her husband. Eventually, she commits suicide—but then her husband starts having incidents that lead him to believe that her ghost has returned. An oddly substantial ghost, capable of paying for a dual headstone (with his side having “soon” as the death date), playing piano and more.

Lots of odd incidents, eventually involving the murder of the family doctor (who certified the wife as being dead) and the semi-accidental death of the husband. Both wills are read at the same time, and other than minor bequests, her money all goes to the chauffeur and his all goes to the half-sister, despite his business partner’s assurance that most would go to the business.

The reveal, such as it is, is mostly annoying, especially as it winds up badly for everybody (and leaves a number of key plot points unresolved). Perhaps the missing five minutes would have helped.

Slow-moving, plodding at times, not terrible but certainly not great. Good cast; odd that it’s in this set, although it was apparently never released in the U.S. Maybe $1.25.

Julie Darling, 1983, color. Paul Nicholas (dir & screenplay), Anthony Franciosa, Sybil Danning, Isabelle Mejias, Paul Hubbard, Cindy Girling. 1:40 [1:30\

Julie just wants to be with her father. Not so much her mother, and she finds a way to take care of that, thanks to a delivery boy who finds the mother hot enough to turn him rapist and, more or less accidentally, killer.

Ah, but the father’s been seeing somebody else, a young widow, and soon enough…well, Julie fails to kill off the widow’s son, but is determined to do in the woman who’s now her stepmother. I won’t go through the whole plot, except to note that some stepmothers ought not to be messed with (and the last thing you want to be is Julie’s girlfriend from school!).

A tawdry little movie (badly panned-and-scanned) that earns its R with nudity, both gratuitous and not quite so gratuitous, plus of course violence. The missing ten minutes might help but wouldn’t make it less tawdry. After watching this, I really feel the need for a shower—but lovers of tawdry noir might give it $0.75.

Posted in Movies and TV | Comments Closed

Cites & Insights 16:1 (January 2016) available

Wednesday, December 2nd, 2015

It’s an odds-and-ends issue, and what may be oddest of all is that it’s still around…

The January 2016 Cites & Insights (16:1) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ16i1.pdf

The two-column print-oriented issue is 26 pages long. If you’re reading it online or on a tablet (or whatever), you might prefer the 51-page single-column 6×9″ version at http://citesandinsights.info/civ16i1on.pdf

The issue includes:

The Front pp. 1-2

Starting the Volume: notes on the annual edition of Volume 15, The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014, and “plans” for the year.

Intersections: PPPPredatory Article Counts: An Investigation pp. 2-10

The series of four blog posts, put together and slightly edited. Why I believe the numbers in a published study of “predatory” article volume are wrong and how they might have gotten that way–with the lagniappe of a first-cut study as to how often the lists of ppppredators actually makes a case.

Media: 50 Movie Gunslinger Classics, part 2 pp. 10-19

After a mere two years, here’s the second half. Roy Rogers, Gene Autry, John Wayne, George Hayes (before and after his “Gabby” persona), Yakima Canutt and many others…

The Back pp. 19-26

This year’s installment of The Low and the High of It, now including portable systems, with a mere 551 to 1 ratio between the cheapest and most expensive CD-only stereo system consisting entirely of Stereophile-recommended components (only 37 to 1 for all-Class-A components) and, wait for it, 1,224 to 1 between the cheapest and most expensive CD-and-LP stereo systems. Also a baker’s dozen of other items.

So: how many people downloaded this issue between its actual upload (at around 3 p.m. Tuesday) and this post, and how many will download it between this post and social media publicity? I’ll have an idea of the first number (if I had to guess, I’d guess 10 or fewer) but not the second…

Posted in Cites & Insights | Comments Closed

Why you should buy The Gold OA Landscape, for various values of “you.”

Tuesday, December 1st, 2015

The PDF ebook version of The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014 appeared on September 10, 2015. To date (nine days short of three months), it has sold three copies.

The paperback version of The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014 appeared on September 11, 2015. To date (eight days short of three months), it has apparently sold nine copies (but it’s possible there are November sales on Amazon, Ingram and Barnes & Noble that haven’t yet been reported).

My September 10, 2015 post offered seven good reasons why libraries, OA advocates and OA publishers might want to buy the book. Those reasons are still a good overall set, so I’ll repeat them here, followed by a little comment on “various values of ‘you’.”

Overall reasons “you” should buy this book

It’s the first comprehensive study of actual publishing patterns in gold OA journals (as defined by inclusion in the Directory of Open Access Journals as of June 15, 2015).
I attempted to analyze all 10,603 journals (that began in 2014 or earlier), and managed to fully analyze 9,824 of them (and I’d say a fully multilingual group would only get 20 more: that’s how many journals I just couldn’t cope with because Chrome/Google didn’t overcome language barriers).
The book offers considerable detail on 9,512 journals (that appear not to be questionable or nonexistent) and what they’ve published from 2011 through 2014, including APC levels, country of publication, and other factors.
It spells out the differences among 28 subject groups (in three major segments) in what’s clearly an extremely heterogeneous field. The 28 pictures of smaller groups of journals are probably more meaningful than the vast picture of the whole field.
If enough people buy this (either edition), an anonymized version of the source spreadsheet will be made available on figshare.
If enough people buy this (either edition), it will encourage continuation of the study for 2015.
Mostly, it’s good to have real data about OA. Do most OA articles involve fees? It depends: in the humanities and social sciences, mostly not; in STEM and biomed, mostly yes. Do most OA journals charge fees? It depends–in biology, yes, but in almost all other fields, no.

Other stuff

Since those first posts, I’ve offered a number of specifics from some chapters (and published an excerpted version of the book–about one-third of it, with none of the graphs–as the October 2015 Cites & Insights. Through yesterday (November 30, 2015), that issue has been downloaded 2,686 times: 1,992 in the single-column format (decidedly preferable in this case), 694 in the traditional print-oriented two-column format.

If one of every ten downloads resulted in a purchased copy (through Lulu), the continuation of this project would be assured for the next two years (assuming I’m still around and healthy). Thar is:

An anonymized version of the current spreadsheet would be up on figshare, available for anybody to use.
I would carry out a full 2015 study (and update of the existing study) based on DOAJ as of early January 2016.
The PDF version of the results would be available for free and the anonymized spreadsheet would be on figshare.
The paperback version would be available at a modest price, probably under $25.
For 2016 data (DOAJ as of early 2017), the same thing would happen.

Heck, if one out of every fifty downloads resulted in a copy purchased through Lulu, an anonymized version of the current spreadsheet would be up on figshare. (If one out of every ten downloads resulted in an Ingram/B&N/Amazon sale, the spreadsheet would be up and I’d certainly carry out the 2015 study and make the spreadsheet available, but perhaps not the free PDF or minimally-priced paperback.)

Where we are, though, is at a dozen: twelve copies to date. Now, maybe all the advocates and publishers are at the seemingly endless series of open access conferences (or maybe it just seems that way from OATP and twitter coverage) and haven’t gotten around to ordering copies.

It’s interesting (or not) to note that Worldcat.org currently shows that 1,230 libraries own copies of Open Access: What You Need to Know Now. Which is still, to be sure, a relevant and worthwhile quick summary of OA.

“It’s early yet,” I continue saying, albeit more softly each time. I don’t want to believe that there’s simply no real support for this kind of real-world detailed measurement of serious Gold OA in action (where “support” has to be measured by willingness to contribute, not just willingness to download freebies), but it’s not looking real promising at the moment. I’ve already seen that a tiny sampling regarding an aspect of OA done by Respectable Scholars will get a lot more coverage and apparent interest than a complete survey, to the extent that disputing the results of that sampling begins to seem useless.

Various values of “you”

What do I believe the book has to offer “you”? A few possibilities:

You, the academic library

If your institution includes a library school (or an i-school), it almost seems like a no-brainer: $55 buys you campuswide electronic access to an in-depth study of an important part of scholarly publishing’s present and future–showing how big a part it already is, its extent in various fields, how much is or isn’t being spent on it, what countries are most involved in each subject, and on and on…

For the rest of you, it seems like you’d also want to have some detailed knowledge of the state of serious gold OA, since that has the best chance of increasing access to scholarly publications and maybe, perhaps, either slowing down the rate of increase in serials costs or even saving some money.

For that matter, if your library is either starting to publish open access journals or administering an APC support fund, shouldn’t you know more about the state of the field? If, for example, you plan a journal in language and linguistics, it should be useful to know that there are more than 500 of them out there; that almost none of them charge APCs; that of those that do, only six charge more than $353; that the vast majority (350) published no more than 18 articles in 2014; and that Brazil is the hotbed of gold OA publishing in these areas. (Those are just examples.)

You, the open access advocate

You really should have this book at hand when you’re reading various commentaries with dubious “facts” about the extent of OA publishing and charges for that publishing.

Too bad there’s no open access activities in the humanities and social sciences? Nonsense! While most serious gold OA journals in this field are relatively small, there are a lot of them–more than 4,000 in all–and they’ve accounted for more than 95,000 articles in each year 2012-2014, just under 100,000 in 2014. More than three-quarters of those articles didn’t involve APCs, and total potential revenues for the segment didn’t reach $10 million in 2014, but there’s a load of activity–with the biggest chunks in Brazil, the United States, Spain, Romania and Canada, but with 22 nations publishing at least 1,000 articles each in 2014 (Singapore is the 22nd).

Those are just a few data points. This book offers a coherent, detailed overview, and I believe it would make you a more effective advocate. And if you deeply believe that readers should never have to pay for anything involved with open access, well, I invite you to help find me grant or institutional funding, so that can happen.

You, the open access publisher

Surely you should know where your journal(s) stand in comparison to the overall shape of OA and of specific fields? Just as surely, you should want this research to continue–and buying the book (or contributing directly) is the way that will happen. (On the other hand, if you publish one of the 65 journals that appear to have malware, you really, truly need to take care of that–and I’ve already published that list for free.)

You, none of the above

If you’re a library person who cares about OA or about the health of your libraries, but you’re not really an advocate, chances are you stopped reading long ago. If not, well, you should also find the book worthwhile.

Otherwise? I suspect that at this point I’m speaking to an empty room, so I’ll stop.

The next update will probably appear when Amazon/B&N/Ingram figures for November appear in my Lulu stream, some time in the next week or two.

Oh: one side note: I mentioned elsewhere that the back cover of the book is just “OA gold” with the ISBN. What I mean by “OA gold” is the precise shade of gold uses in the OA open-lock logo as it appears in Wikimedia. I downloaded the logo and used Paint.net’s color chooser to make that the background color for the entire cover. (I never was able to get a suitable shade of gold/orange using other techniques.)

Here’s the book cover, in case you weren’t aware of it:

Posted in C&I Books, open access | Comments Closed

One-third of the way there!

Sunday, November 22nd, 2015

With today’s French purchase of a PDF copy of The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014, and including Cites & Insights Annual purchases, we’re now one-third of the way to the first milestone, at which I’ll upload an anonymized version of the master spreadsheet to figshare. (As with a previous German purchase, I can only assume the country based on Lulu country codes…)

Now an even dozen copies sold.

Posted in Books and publishing, open access | Comments Closed

One sale gone, another started: 25%

Friday, November 20th, 2015

When you go to buy my books, always check the Lulu home page for discounts. Just a reminder…

I’m guessing there will be a series of brief sales for a while, but can’t be sure. In the meantime:

SHOP25 as a coupon code gets you 25% off print books (and calendars, if you’re so inclined) from now through November 23, 2015.

Coupon codes are case sensitive.

Another reminder: you’re not decreasing my net revenue (counted toward future research) by using these sale codes–I get the same net revenue.

For various reasons, I took a look yesterday at all-time Lulu sales (it takes me one minute to generate that spreadsheet and not much longer to go through it). I noticed something that, because it’s at such a low level, had slipped my attention.

To wit: yes, occasionally somebody does buy a Cites & Insights Annual edition. Excluding my own copies, there have been sixteen such sales over the years, with the most being 2007 (4 copies) and 2008 (3 copies); the only one with no outside sales to date is the latest, 2015. Since I produce these so I’ll have my own copy (if I include cost of paper and inkjet ink, it’s actually cheaper for me to buy one at my author’s price than it is to print out a new copy of each issue and have Fedex Kinko’s bind it in an ugly Velobind binding–and the result is both more handsome and more usable), this is a nice extra. Of course, it’s also a great way to have past issues on hand…

Posted in C&I Books, Cites & Insights | Comments Closed

Five thousand pages!

Thursday, November 19th, 2015

I maintain a little spreadsheet to track word and page counts for Cites & Insights [with the slightly-out-of-date name “first10 length”]. I print it out every month ortwo but I don’t look at it very often.

And I missed a milestone of sorts: through the December 2015 issue (not including phantom issues that are only in the annual paperbacks), C&I has passed the 5,000-page mark: in all, 5,002 pages. (If you’re wondering, the longest volume was volume 9, 2009, with 418 pages; the shortest were volume 1 [252 pages including the preview issue], volume 2 [262 pages], and volume 11 [274 pages: the year C&I almost shut down for good].

Word count’s not at a milestone; it should hit four million words in two to four months.

No deeper meaning; just marking a wordy milestone. It’s a handsome set of paperbacks on one of my bookshelves–although the first five volumes are sort of ugly, being Velobound things produced at Kinko’s. In case you weren’t aware, volumes 6 through 15 are all available, $45 each [with occasional Lulu discounts: check the front page], with roughly half the proceeds going to continue C&I and my OA research. Oh, and on most of them you get a huge photo from our travels–all of them have such photos, but in all but two the photo’s a wraparound, 11″ high and close to 18″ wide. More information here.