GOAJ Growth & Shrinkage: label problem found and corrected

If you care about one-year patterns of OA journal growth and shrinkage, and if you’ve already downloaded a copy of Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015 or Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015: A Subject Approach, you might want to download them again, either directly from waltcrawford.name (the links here) or from Lulu (easiest to start at the project page).

As far as I can tell, I’m the only person who’s purchased either book as a $6 paperback so far, so that’s not an issue.

Why download again?

I discovered a label problem with the growth and shrinkage tables–all of them.

To wit: where it says “grew” it should say “shrank” and vice-versa.

The tables have been fixed and the books have been reloaded. You can tell the corrected versions because the copyright page mentions the correction. Corrected versions were in place as of 4 p.m. PDT, Saturday, June 18, 2016.

Only these tables (and in some cases the brief commentary following them) are at issue. The dataset is unchanged. No other tables are affected. No article counts are affected.

[In fact, halfway through the main book I almost decided to rip out these tables: the more I looked at them, the less I found any significance in them. For most larger groupings it boils down to “about one-fifth of journals stayed about the same, about 15% each grew or shrank rapidly and about 25% each grew or shrank moderately.” Two-year or three-year patterns might be more meaningful, but are much more difficult to do. For most larger groupings, fixing the table makes at most a few percentage points difference.]

For now, the June 2016 Cites & Insights still has mislabeled rows in some tables; that may be corrected later on.Cites & Insights 16:5 has also been corrected.

My apologies for the labeling problem.  I can come up with all sorts of excuses (the house elves, my still-problematic right hand, crazed politics); in fact, it happened because that particular pivot-table-based table template was a little too indirect. The others are all more straightforward and all retest just fine.

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