Walt at Random

I’ll keep this one relatively short, as it’s about more direct appreciation of the gold OA research: namely, money. I’ve already responded to two people who might, conceivably, have money available for this research (neither one even suggested that it could happen), giving the amount I’d want–so I might as well be up-front and provide the options here.

1. The Donations + Purchases Route: Milestones

• $1,500 total: the 2011-2014 spreadsheet, anonymized slightly, goes up on figshare.
• $2,500 total: I give serious thought to renewing the project for 2015 data, using DOAJ’s journal list as of the first week of 2016.
• $5,000 total: I’d definitely do the 2011-2015 version and make the spreadsheet available on figshare.

That total includes donations to Cites & Insights since the 2011-2014 project was announced and net proceeds from sales of all of my self-published books since September 1, 2015 (and, for that matter, the honorarium portion of expenses-paid speaking engagements related to this work, but I’m not holding my breath for any of those).

As previously noted, through right now, we’re more than one-third of the way but less than halfway to the first milestone.

(If the second milestone isn’t reached by April 2016, I don’t think this would happen–I’d have moved on to other things by then.)

2. Direct Grant Funding or Consulting Contract: Annual Costs

This is the set of numbers I sent back to two interested parties. It would cover another round of research, including rechecking APC status and amount for all listed journals, tweaking the grading criteria slightly, writing up the research, and making the anonymized spreadsheet available on figshare and the PDF version of the results available for free. (The paperback version would be priced at very close to production costs, quite probably less than $10.)

My price would be, at minimum, $0.50 per journal in DOAJ in the first week of 2016, plus $1,000 for the analysis/writeup phase. Right now, that would come to about $6,332.

I’d be delighted to discuss this with any possible agency or agencies (actually, there’s one exception–not the one in Ohio–but I don’t think that’s likely to be an issue). If the money was secure before 2016, I could do some of the APC/site rechecking before 2016. If more discussion and tweaks are desired, the price might be higher.

Obviously, the sponsor(s) would or could have their names on the results or could even handle distribution.

3. Part-time Consulting Research

I believe this project will require at least 500 to 600 hours to do properly, so if somebody wanted to hire me as a quarter-time consulting researcher to carry on this project (for one or more years), I’d certainly consider it. (I’m assuming that nobody hiring a consultant or researcher in California pays less than $26,000/year, esp. since California minimum wage is likely to be $30,000 before too long.)

Obviously, I’d expect to discuss possible expansions and tweaks, and the agency could release the report under its name, with me credited somewhere.

Oh, one more thing:

4. Redoing the Beall’s Lists Investigation

That would cost a lot of money because it’s neither interesting nor fun nor, I believe, especially useful. If someone was determined, I’d consider it for $1 per journal within Beall’s lists plus $2,000 for analysis and writeup–that is, a minimum of $13,000 (and going up all the time!). But I’d probably turn it down even then: life really is too short.

[Oh, by the way: if you’re interested in funding this research, contact me at waltcrawford@gmail.com]

Earlier this year, in a comment stream on a blog post about open access and fees, one commenter (from the commercial journal field) asked whether there were any actual numbers on how many articles were published in gold OA journals that don’t charge APCs or other author-side fees.

At the time, another commenter responded with my figures from the partial study of gold OA journals, the one that didn’t include journals without English-language interfaces. The total from 2012 through 2014 was around 470,000 articles.

The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014 includes graphs showing free and paid article counts overall and for each segment and subject, and shows overall article counts and the percentage of free articles, making it easy to calculate approximate counts, but I didn’t actually include the figures that create the graphs; that would have been redundant and I was trying to keep the book as short as possible. And the excerpted version in Cites & Insights didn’t include graphs at all.

So, for what it’s worth, here are some key figures for articles published in serious gold OA journals (those listed in DOAJ ) and graded A or B in my study) that do not charge APCs or other author-side fees.

Overall

Among the DOAJ journals included in The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014 (grades A & B), 7,048 did not charge APCs. Those journals published 177,855 articles in 2011, 198,552 articles in 2012, 206,561 articles in 2013 and 206,588 in 2014. That’s a total of 789,556 articles during the four-year period in serious gold OA journals without author-side fees.

Biology and Medicine

For this segment, there were 57,627 articles in 2011, 63,411 in 2012, 64,735 in 2013 and 66,057 in 2014, for a total of 251,830 articles during the four-year period in serious gold OA journals without author-side fees.

Science, Technology, Engineering and Math

Serious gold OA journals without APCs or other author-side fees in this segment published 52,892 articles in 2011; 59,593 in 2012; 64,637 in 2013; and 65,088 in 2014, for a total of 242,210 articles during the four-year period.

Humanities and Social Sciences

Serious gold OA journals without APCs or other author-side fees in this segment published 67,350 articles in 2011; 75,556 in 2012; 77,189 in 2013; and 75.443 in 2014, for a total of 295,538 articles during the four-year period.

Surprised that there were more no-fee articles in the humanities and social sciences than in either biomed or STEM? You shouldn’t be.

By the way, today (Monday, October 26, 2015) is the last day to get 30% off this or any other Lulu books using coupon code OCTFLASH30.

I think I finally get it: what Jeffrey Beall is driving at, given his apparent standard that One Bad Article Condemns An Entire Publisher and his apparent plan to discredit each significant gold OA publisher for some reason, one at a time…

Namely, he’s too narrow but he’s right–and I’m using “PPPPredator” for “potential, possible or probable predatory publisher.”

I apologize for doubting him; I simply failed to realize the Oprahism in what he’s saying, once you remove the OA-only blinders: to wit, every publisher is a PPPPredator.

No? Consider:

• BMC is owned by Springer Nature, so now that Beall’s pointing out one possibly-defective article in one journal from BMC–but phrasing it as an attempt to discredit BMC in general, with the tagline “This is scholarly open-access publishing,” it only makes sense to conclude that Springer Nature is a PPPPredator.
• Frontiers just had the honor of being added to Beall’s list because…well, because Beall Gets Complaints. (But then, it’s also part of Springer Nature and we already know Springer Nature is a PPPPredator) Corrected: While Holzbrinck, owner of Nature Publishing Group (now part of Springer Nature), is a minority investor in Frontiers, NPG itself does not own Frontiers. I regret the error/oversimplification.
• Beall’s made it clear that APC-charging journals inherently represent a conflict of interest (but apparently subscription journals with page charges don’t), and pretty much every major subscription journal publisher now has at least “hybrid” journals (it appears that a substantial majority of subscription journals from larger publishers now have “hybrid” options, at least based on Outsell’s reports), and most of them have APC-charging Gold OA journals, then Elsevier, Wiley, Taylor & Francis, SAGE, Oxford University Press, Cambridge University Press, the American Chemical Society, BMJ, RSC, IOP, American Institute of Physics…all PPPPredators. (With a bit of research, I could extend that list quite a bit…)
• AAAS (publishers of Science)? Yep. Science Advances (even if the others aren’t “hybrid,” which I don’t know), so AAAS is a PPPPredator.
• Hmm. That does leave gold OA publishers funded by means other than APCs, but since Beall’s already attempted to discredit SciELO and Redalyc for being “favelas,” I’m sure he has similar approaches at the ready for other serious non-APC gold publishers.

So there it is. You’re a PPPPredator! You’re a PPPPredator! You’re all PPPPredators!

(Now that I think of it, I don’t believe ALA has any APC-charging gold OA journals or hybrid journals, although it does have  both non-APC gold OA and subscription journals…but ALA’s published my writing on open access (or my “bilge” as Beall termed it in one of his never-ad-hominem remarks, which he since deleted from the comment stream in which it appeared), so they must be a PPPPredator.)

Well, that’s a relief.

Actually, it’s also true: any publisher is potentially a predatory publisher, especially when one man gets to determine what’s predatory. Pretty much every publisher will occasionally publish a “bad” paper, possibly one that some others think is “obviously” bad, possibly even one that’s plagiarized. Pretty much every publisher will have at least one journal where at some point the editorial board or peer review may involve issues (excessive publication, editorial overrides, etc.).

I need to modify some previous conclusions. As far as I can tell, somewhere between 1.4 and 2.5 million papers were published last year by PPPPredatory publishers,in the most general sense.

If you want to avoid all PPPPredatory publishers….you’ll just have to self-publish or go directly to arXiv or some other archive.

Or you could step back, take a deep breath, and look at journals using a little judgment and, for open access, the Directory of Open Access Journals, a whitelist that’s getting better and better. And maybe a little common sense. If you believe your already-paid-for scholarly research deserves the widest possible audience, there are thousands of serious gold OA journals available that don’t even charge author-side fees. (At least 6,383 of them published articles in 2014.)

Oh, and since this is my own odd little contribution to Open Access Week, let me add: If you want to know more about the realities of serious gold OA publishing from 2011 through 2014, based on a 100% “sample” of what’s out there, I’ll recommend my book The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014, available in paperback form or as a site-licensed non-DRM PDF ebook. Every library school should have a copy; so should every serious OA publisher, at the very least. So, IMNSHO, should every ARL library.

A couple of non-footnotes:

• What? You believe one fundamentally flawed journal is enough to discredit a publisher, even if one article isn’t? You might check into the publisher that continues to publish a “scientific” journal that presumes that water somehow has memory… Just a hint, the name begins with Els…
• If you think I’m saying “All publishers are alike” or “There are no fundamentally defective journals” or “There are no publishers more interested in scamming money than in actual scholarship”–I’m not.
• If you think I’m saying “Blacklists are fundamentally flawed, and any transparent blacklist would include every major publisher”–well, yes, I am.
• NOTE: A handful of possibly-inflammatory words changed at 4:15 p.m. PDT October 20, 2015. The message stays the same.
• And, of course, “pretty much every” does not at all mean “every,” just “many or most large and well-known.” Maybe it’s in the same truth-space as “all gold OA publishing involves APCs.” Maybe not.

The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014 came out on September 11, 2015* (35 days ago). The free excerpted version, Cites & Insights 15.9, came out the next day (September 12, 2015).

To date (excluding most of September 30 for the C&I figures):

• The single-column version of C&I 15.9 has been downloaded at least 1,607 times, while the two-column version has been downloaded at least 202 times. So apparently 1,809 people (or more) find the work worthwhile.
• Other than my own copy, the paperback edition has sold five copies, the site-licensed PDF ebook has sold one copy.
• Exactly one copy of the book has sold in the first half of October 2015; the previous sale was on September 24, so one copy of the book has sold in the last 22 days.
• New contributions to C&I to encourage continued work, since September 11, 2015: $0.
• New sources of funding: Zero.

It’s early yet, but the nearly complete lack of activity is not encouraging. (The single copy sold in October was purchased from Lulu’s German outpost.) I’m roughly one-sixth of the way toward making the data freely available and one-tenth of the way toward considering continued research.

(There are no copies in Worldcat so far. That’s not surprising. It is gratifying to see that Open Access: What You Need to Know Now shows 1,216 copies in Worldcat.org. Maybe I should have quit while I was ahead…)

*Technically, the ebook came out on September 10, but didn’t yet have the explicit site license statement.

On October 13, 2015, Frontiers posted a piece on its blog, “Frontiers’ financial commitment to open access publishing.” It’s sort of an effort to be transparent about the OA publisher’s finances, although “sort of” may be the right qualifier, as it lumps all the publishing-related stuff into one $6.8 million chunk (only 34% of total spending).

But I’m not commenting on the piece in general; at least, it’s more data than we have for a lot of other players in scholarly journals. Instead, I’m concerned about the second paragraph, because I believe it at tends to undermine the remainder of the post.

I have a slight concern about the very first sentence in the post as well, to wit “In 2014, the annual cost of traditional, subscription-based scholarly journal publishing was $14 Billion” Suddenly seeing total spending on traditional scholarly journals (this isn’t cost, this is price) jump by 40% is rather startling. But at least that figure is sourced, sort of: apparently it involves combining two different reports, one of them published before the year it supposedly covers. But I’ll leave that for somebody else to deal with.

Here’s the paragraph in question:

Open Access does away with subscriptions to allow any reader in the world unrestricted access to scholarly articles. To provide this option, Open Access publishers directly charge the authors an Article Publishing Charge (APC), which authors typically pay from their grants or receive institutional support to cover the cost. The APC generally ranges from $500 to $6,000 with an industry average of around $3,000. Often people wonder “Where does this money go?”

The first sentence is just fine. The last sentence is just fine.

But those middle two sentences:

To provide this option, Open Access publishers directly charge the authors an Article Publishing Charge (APC), which authors typically pay from their grants or receive institutional support to cover the cost.

Can y’all repeat with me the old refrain? Most OA journals do not have Article Publishing Charges. And yet this sentence doesn’t say “most Open Access publishers” (which would be false) or “the OA publishers publishing the most articles” (which would be true for some fields and as a whole, but false for others). Nope. It’s an unqualified “Open Access publishers.” Which is convenient, of course, if you’re an APC-charging OA publisher…

I’ll give you two real numbers–one that’s Published by a Reputable Publisher but covers only about two-thirds of serious gold OA journals (that is, the journals in DOAJ), another that covers nearly all serious gold OA journals but is not Published by a Reputable Publisher, instead being self-published by, well, me.

Published by a Reputable Publisher*:

67% of the gold OA journals that are accessible to English-speaking readers, reachable on the web, and actually published articles between January 1, 2011 and June 30, 2014 do not charge article processing charges. (Biomed is the only broad segment in which a slight majority of journals–53%–do have APCs.)

Published by Walt Crawford with transparent methodology:

Of the 9,512 gold OA journals that don’t raise warning flags and published articles between 2011 and 2014, 74% do not charge APCs. (A higher percentage of non-English journals are free to authors.) Of the 8,760 that actually published articles in 2014, 72.9% do not charge APCs. In 2014, 42.8% of articles in gold OA journals were in journals that don’t charge APCs. Even in biomed, a majority of journals (56.2%) do not charge APCs.

Now, let’s look at the second of the two offending sentences:

The APC generally ranges from $500 to $6,000 with an industry average of around $3,000.

As with the first sentence, this one’s not sourced, but here are some real numbers–again, one covering two-thirds of serious gold OA journals (those at least partly accessible to English-speaking people) and Published by a Reputable Publisher, and one covering nearly all serious gold OA journals:

Published by a Reputable Publisher*:

Fees range from $8 to $5,000. The average is such a silly figure that it wasn’t published, but only 12% of APC-charging journals charge $2,000 or more and only 16 out of 2,064 charge $3,000 or more. So an “industry average” of $3,000 must define the “industry” to include only the 30 most expensive journals. (42% of the journals charge less than $450, for what that’s worth.)

Based on article counts, the average APC per article in APC-charging journals is $1,045; the average across all articles is $630. Even for biomed, the average across APC-charging journals is $1,460, a far cry from $3,000.

Even in biomed, a minority of APC-charging journals charge $1,451 or more.

Published by Walt Crawford with transparent methodology:

I didn’t provide top and bottom figures because they’re not very meaningful, but the top quadrant of APC-charging journals (that is, the 25% with highest APCs) begins at $1,420 and the second quadrant begins at $600, so the average is somewhere in the $600 range. (Even in biomed, only 520 out of 1,365 APC-charging journals charges $1,420 or more.)

Based on article counts, the average charge per article for APC-charging journals in biomed was $949 in 2014.

Let’s look directly at the spreadsheet (not published, and in this case I’ll even include a few hundred journals that seem to be sketchy–those graded C–for a total of 9,824 journals):

• The highest APC in 2014 was still $5,000, with only one journal at that level, but among this broader group of journals, there are 28 charging $3,000 or more–that is, 28 out of 2,619 APC-charging journals.
• The low is now $2 (in U.S. dollars), not $8.
• The average APC is $830.
• The median APC is $600, as you’d expect.

Ah, but those numbers include a few journals that I regard as sketchy. So let’s look at just the 9,512 journals that appear to be good:

• The high is still $5,000, with 28 journals out of 2,470 charging $3,000 or more. (That’s just a little over 1%–an odd version of “average.”)
• The low is still $2.
• The average APC per journal, a very silly figure, is now $842.
• The median APC is…still $600.

I suppose you could inflate that “average APC” a lot by including so-called “hybrid” journals, which tend to charge extremely high fees for the handful of suckers wealthy authors/funding agencies that pay to (possibly) make their articles open while shoring up the $10 (or $14?) billion subscription marketplace. But by my reading, it’s a bad set of numbers (with no sources provided).

*Open-Access Journals: Idealism and Opportunism, published as the August/September 2015 issue of Library Technology Reports, an imprint of the American Library Association.

Another in an intermittent series of posts encouraging folks to buy The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014, in part by noting what’s not in the excerpted Cites & Insights version.

Chapter 10 is Medicine–which probably should be broken into, say, half a dozen subsets, but I don’t know enough to make that breakdown. It’s by far the largest subject, as noted in the excerpted version.

A few items from the book’s coverage:

• While a majority of articles published in serious gold OA journals in 2013 and 2014 involve APCs, a majority of those in 2011 and 2012 were in no-fee journals.
• Fee-based articles have more than doubled since 2011.
• 44% of articles involving APCs appeared in journals within the most expensive segment, $1,960 and up–and the average for articles involving APCs was $1,446 per article ($854 per article overall).
• There does seem to be a gold rush of APC-charging journals starting in 2007 and peaking in 2009-2010.
• You can probably guess the two countries publishing the most medicine articles in 2014, but maybe not the order: UK first, US second. Iran is sixth. For the rest of the 22 countries with at least 1,000 articles, see the book.

Much, much more in the book. Worthwhile for your library or if you’re seriously interested in OA. If enough copies sell (no change in the last week), the anonymized spreadsheet will go up on figshare; if enough more copies sell (or some other form of funding comes through), the study will be continued in 2016 for 2015 publications.

And you can buy the book through Amazon (and possibly Ingram), although it counts three times as much toward sales goals if you buy through Lulu.

I’ve probably said this before, but thinking about yesterday’s post reminded me of it once again.

That is:

This should not be my fight.

No, I haven’t gone to each site that wrote a story touting the Shen/Björk article to point out the problems with the data–especially now that it’s clear what the response will be. Somebody should. They have the actual data.

But it shouldn’t be me. It’s really not my fight.

I didn’t even start out to discredit Beall’s lists. I did cross swords with him on his absurd notion that the Big Deal had solved the serials crisis, but I did a real-world study of the journals and publishers on his lists to get a reality check. I was fully ready to believe that the picture was as bleak as he painted it–and if that’s how the data had come out, that’s how I would have published it.

After all: I don’t publish any OA journals. I’m not on the editorial board of any OA journals. I don’t need publications for tenure (I’m retired and was never in a tenure-track position). I don’t make big bucks from speaking fees (haven’t done many appearances lately, and that’s OK). I sure as heck don’t make big bucks from the data gathering and analysis, although ALA Editions has published some of my work in the area (not big bucks, but some bucks and a venue I regard highly).

For that matter, I’ve been the subject of ad hominem attacks from Stevan Harnad as well as Jeffrey Beall, so I’m not even well-liked among all OA folks.

What I’ve been trying to do is see what’s actually happening and bring my 26 years of off-and-on experience with OA to bear in looking at what’s going on now and what’s being said. My mildly obsessive personality and retired status, and reasonably well organized techniques, have allowed me to do some large-scale studies that wouldn’t have been done otherwise. (With modest funding, I’d keep on doing them.)

It’s painful to see questionable results spread far and wide: it hurts good OA (the bulk of it) and probably doesn’t do much to questionable OA. It’s painful to see librarians and others take the easy way out, relying on a seriously defective set of blacklists rather than starting with an increasingly good whitelist (DOAJ) and working from there.

I’ll continue to provide facts and perspectives. (I’ve just subdivided a bunch of tagged items into a baker’s dozen subtopics within the overall “Ethics and Access” topic. That’s probably the December Cites & Insights; it might also be the January one, depending on how it goes.) I’ll continue to post the occasional post. I’m hoping some libraries, librarians, OA folks and others will eventually buy the book (which is apparently now available on Amazon as well as via Lulu; it may also be on Ingram, but I have no way of testing that). It’s always a pleasure to see my work being cited or used where it’s appropriate.

I’m not going away just yet…but as for coping with all the misrepresentations well, it’s not (or at least not entirely) my fight.

For those of you who need a Respectable Published Source:

I refer you to Open-Access Journals: Idealism and Opportunism, published by the American Library Association. That link gets you to the $43 40-page monograph (published as the August/September 2015 issue of Library Technology Reports). You can also go here to read the first chapter or order the ebook version (I believe you can also order individual chapters). If you’re in one of the several hundred libraries that subscribes to Library Technology Reports, it should already be available to you. (The link here is to one of two worldcat.org records for the series.)

Open-Access Journals: Idealism and Opportunism was professionally copy-edited, edited, and typeset. It was also reviewed by three professionals (two librarians, one other), although that wasn’t formal peer review. It’s concise, and includes not only real-world figures for 6,490 gold OA journals (in DOAJ) publishing 366,210 articles in 2013, it includes chapters on the “sideshow” of Beall’s lists, dealing with OA journals (including spotting questionable journals), and libraries and OA journals.

(It’s not a complete survey of DOAJ, because it doesn’t include journals that lack an English-language interface option. It also goes through June 30, 2014 rather than the end of 2014–thus, the 366,210 count is for 2013). It’s also, of course, far less detailed than The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014.

But it’s concise, well-edited, based on an actual survey rather than sampling, and published by what I consider to be the premier publisher in librarianship, part of the world’s largest library association. So it has that level of authority that my self-pubbed works may not have.

The author? Walt Crawford. (No, I’m not angling for extra money here: the fee for preparing the issue was a one-time fee, with no royalties. But the final chapters make it a great resource, and for those who require Reputable Publishers, you don’t get more reputable than ALA.)