Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015: A SPARC Project

I’m delighted to announce that SPARC (the Scholarly Publishing and Academic Resources Coalition) is supporting the update of Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015 to provide an empirical basis for evaluating Open Access sustainability models. I am carrying out this project with SPARC’s sponsorship, building from and expanding on The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014.

The immediate effect of this project is that the dataset for the earlier project is publicly available for use on zenodo.org and on my personal website. The data is public domain, but attribution and feedback are both appreciated.

Here’s what the rest of the project means:

  • I am basing the study on the Directory of Open Access Journals as of December 31, 2015. With eleven duplicates (same URL, different journal names, typically in two languages) removed and reported back to DOAJ, that means a starting point of 10,948 journals. All journals will be accounted for, and as many as feasible will be fully analyzed.
  • The grades and subgrades have been simplified and clarified, and two categories of journal excluded from the 2014 study will now be included (but tagged so that they can be counted separately if desired): journals consisting primarily of conference reports peer-reviewed at the conference level, and journals that require free registration to read articles.
  • I’m visiting all journal sites (and using DOAJ as an additional source) to determine current article processing charges (if any), add 2015 article counts to data carried over from the 2014 project, clean up article counts as feasible, and add 2011-2014 article counts for journals not in the earlier report.
  • Since some journals (typically smaller ones) take some time to post articles, and since some journals will not be analyzed for various reasons (malware, inability to access, difficulty in translating site or counting articles), I’ll be doing a second pass for all those requiring such a pass, starting in April 2016 or after the first pass is complete. My intent is to include as many journals as possible (although existence of malware is an automatic stopping point), although that doesn’t extend to (for example) going through each issue of a weekly journal only available in PDF form.
  • The results will be written up in a form somewhat similar to The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014, refined based on feedback and discussion.
  • Once the analysis and preparation are complete, the dataset (in anonymized form) will be made freely available at appropriate sites and publicized as available.
  • The PDF version of the final report will be freely available and carry an appropriate Creative Commons license.
  • A paperback version of the final report will be available; details will be announced closer to publication.
  • A shorter version of the final report will appear in Cites & Insights, and it’s likely that notes along the way will also appear there.

My thanks to SPARC for making this possible.

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