I’ve just published the PDF edition of The Gold OA Landscape, 2011-2014 at Lulu.com.
(A $60 trade paperback version will be available as soon as I get a second ISBN and “design” a cover for it–this one has a minimalist pseudo-cover. Most likely tomorrow or Saturday, possibly later. A portion of the book, without any of the graphs, will appear as the October 2015 Cites & Insights when I have time to put it together, probably some time next week.)
This is a 219-page 6″ x 9″ PDF (205+xiv), which should work well on most e-devices with reasonably large screens. The ISBN is 978-1-329-54713-1. The price is $55. (Lulu sometimes has sales, which show up on the lulu.com home page; the discount comes out of Lulu’s share, so I’m fine with the sales.)
The link shown–repeated here–yields the product page, including a preview of Chapter 1, which includes the biggest numbers and some overall notes. There are 40 chapters in all, 28 of which are 4-page subject chapters that expand enormously on the series of blog posts in this blog (adding more than half again as many journals) and include some new information, e.g., the countries publishing the most articles for each subject.
Why you (or your library, or especially if you’re an OA publisher or advocate) should buy this book
Actually, I think the paperback version is easier to use, but then I’m a print guy. And if you’re wondering: I tried to create an ePub version, which would have been available at Amazon, Nook, iStore, etc….but while Lulu’s doc-to-ePub converter is reasonably good, I couldn’t get the 80-odd graphs to come out right, and when I tried the results in Calibre’s emulation of a Kindle Fire, I found the tables to be difficult to read (no borders, for example). PDFs preserve the careful formatting of the book…
Some good reasons to consider 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.
And so on…
Anyway: If you prefer e-reading, take a look and maybe buy it. If you prefer print, wait for another post.
