Since the first iteration of Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015 appeared one week ago,I thought it might be fun to see the takeup so far.
- The paperback: nobody has read it yet. One copy sold to date–mine (should arrive in the next day or two). I guess $6 is a lot of money… (frequent sales, such as 20% today, I think, but it’s true that there’s shipping and you have to have an account).
- The PDF: Eleven (11) copies to date through Lulu. Once I was informed that you needed an account to get the free ($0) download, I put a copy on my website–not really intended for heavy-duty usage. As of 5:30 this morning (June 7, 2016), there have been 1,171 attempted downloads–but based on data usage, it can’t have been downloaded more than about 860 times. Still, that’s a lot for what’s really six days.
- The dataset: 313 visits on figshare–but only 32 downloads, and that number’s barely grown since the second day. Are there a significant number of people that actually have any use for this data? (Visits without downloads can only view the first 50 rows, so they don’t really count…) So far, nobody’s asked me to post a copy at, say, Zenodo or on my own site, so I’ll assume figshare is all anybody needs.
- The site: Only 161 site visits (since 5:30 a.m. on June 1, 2016: I don’t know about May 31st). Most folks who’ve publicized this have apparently linked directly to the PDF. I can’t force them to do otherwise.
- The post: Again, I’m missing May 31st data, but it’s been visited 623 times since 5:30 a.m. on June 1, 2016 (plus any RRS feedthrough).
- The C&I Issue: Only 91 downloads, combining the one-column and two-column versions. Much lower than I’d expect, given that the issue is a coherent excerpted version of the book…
That’s where things stand. I’ll keep tracking from time to time. Will anybody buy the paperback? I think it’s much easier to reference, but that’s me–an old-fashioned guy. (If I knew that nobody wanted a print version, I might have used solid colors for the graph templates, which would probably have resulted in a much smaller PDF–but would be very difficult to read in b&w print form.)
Best guess is that the subject-by-subject supplement will be out in the next two weeks or so. I’m finding that the expanded set of metrics (beyond last year’s study) is yielding much richer stories, but those stories take seven pages per subject rather than the old four.
Question
Is anybody interested in the second supplement, the countries of OAWorld, with full chapters for either 37 (50 or more journals) or 55 (25 or more) countries and brief writeups on another 72 countries (15 with 10 to 24 journals, and an argument could be made for giving these full treatment–and 57 with fewer than 10 journals)?
I believe it would be an interesting set of profiles–but updating seven chapters and adding 61 or even 43 new chapters (including one for few-journal summaries for each region other than Pacific/English, where all countries have at least 50 journals) is a significant amount of unpaid labor and would yield a fairly big book & download. (The supplements are extras, not part of the SPARC contract, but they’ll still be free as PDFs.)
I’ll open comments and would also appreciate direct email, either of the “yes, this would be useful” or “why bother?” variety. To waltcrawford@gmail.com, as usual
