If you have opinions on what was great or not so great in The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014, or ideas on how the book-length analysis and presentation could be better for the new, much more complete Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015, I’d like to hear from you–ideally before May 1, 2016 (I’ll start working on the book right around then). (Note that the PDF ebook version will be free and freely available with a CC BY license; the paperback will be priced at roughly production cost.)
Which tables and graphs seem especially worthwhile? Which writeups were more or less informative?
Since most of you haven’t seen the full book, there are two resources to base your feedback on:
- The October 2015 Cites & Insights includes about half the text and around half the tables from the book, but none of the graphs.
- The April 2016 Cites & Insights includes an introductory essay but mostly consists of pages 39 through 73 of the book, chapters 5 through 9, showing exactly what’s in the book.
(Note: you can reasonably ignore the “Why Anonymize?” section of the introductory essay in that issue: in consultation with SPARC, I’ve decided to make the non-anonymized spreadsheet openly available when the analysis is complete, One very minor consequence of non-anonymity: seven small journals that I’d flagged as questionable for judgmental reasons are no longer flagged. That doesn’t affect the analysis at even 0.1% levels.)
Both links are to the 6×9″ “online” versions, which better reflect the book pages.
You can comment directly on this post (for a week or two) or, better yet, send email to waltcrawford@gmail.com. I don’t promise to use your suggestions; I do promise to think about them seriously.
(I’ll be asking for feedback on one very new and fairly distinctive aspect of the 2011-2015 survey, which arose from a decision to look at countries by region–but I’ll have more to say about that next week, I think, in a blog post and as part of a short Cites & Insights.)
Minor updates:
- If you’re following my recovery from surgery (excision of a Schwannoma, a benign nerv sheath tumor): No, I’m not back to full touch typing; have begun hand therapy and ordered Dragon NaturallySpeaking. Posting and C&I still much reduced and the textual portions of the book may be more concise than otherwise–which could be a good thing.
- I’ve completed the second data-gathering pass for the 2011-2015 project. The number of fully-analyzed “good” journals is up from 9,512 to 10,324, and the rough estimate of total articles from those journals for 2015 is around 566,000.
- Yes, there will be a Cites & Insights soon, probably before May 1; no, it probably won’t be very long, given the difficulties of six-fingered typing…
