The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014 appeared September 10, 2015 in PDF ebook form and September 11, 2015 in paperback form. Cites & Insights 15:9 (October 2015), which is an excerpted version of the book, appeared September 12, 2015. (The link here is to the single-column version, for good reason.)
So it’s basically been a week since the most comprehensive study of serious Gold OA (as evidenced by listing in the Directory of Open Access Journals) was made available. I thought a status update might be in order–especially since the availability of anonymized data for this project, and continuation of this research for 2015 (done in 2016), depend so heavily on the takeup of this report.
The Issue
As of 5:09 a.m. this morning (September 18, 2011), Cites & Insights 15:9 has been downloaded 956 times; it may very well have reached the thousand mark by now. That’s a gratifying number: it means lots of people are interested. It’s also gratifying that people are apparently paying attention: more than 90% of those downloads are of the more-readable 6×9″ single-column version.
(“More readable” in this special case because tables that use all of a 6×9″ book text body are involved–although the single-column version is generally more readable if you’re reading online. Normally, I prefer and push the two-column print-oriented version, the one I actually try to make look good. This is by no means a normal issue.)
If one out of every ten people who download this issue find it worthwhile enough to contribute $10 to Cites & Insights (link on the home page), we’d already be two-thirds of the way to assuring full availability of the anonymized dataset and one-third of the way toward continuing this research next year. But that’s like saying “if all refereed articles were published in OA using the apparent efficiencies of SciELO, it would cost less than $250 million a year for the world’s entire output, saving close to $10 billion for other purposes”–it may be true, but it makes some wildly improbable assumptions.
The Book
As this is written (9:15 a.m. on September 18, 2015), people or institutions other than me have purchased two copies of the book–one each paperback and PDF. That’s a start–and about one-sixteenth of the “dataset availability” goal or one-26th of the “continued research” goal.
I’d love to announce more general availability of the paperback, but Lulu’s requirements are that I have to not only order but “approve” a copy of the book first. I haven’t received the book yet, so can’t do that yet…and it can be up to eight more weeks after that before the book shows up on Amazon or Ingram. So, well, it’s gonna be a while. (Meanwhile, to be sure, each copy purchased through non-Lulu sources would only count one-third as much for my goals.)
The Goals
Basically, both acknowledgment of the work (and the 956 downloads help a lot there!) and some modest revenue from book purchases, C&I contributions, or some direct form of funding.
I’ll probably do more posts, now and then, pointing out interesting things in the data. I’ll do more status updates when/if there are significant changes.
