Archive for January, 2017

Gold Open Access Journals: January update

Tuesday, January 31st, 2017

It’s January 31–the last day of the month, when I fetch usage statistics for my websites (as always, omitting about 6 hours of that last day), so here’s an update on GOAJ:

  • Paperbacks: No change. Two copies of GOAJ itself sold. So far, none of the others.
  • Dataset: 26 more views, 1004 total views; 5 more downloads, 445 total downloads.
  • GOAJ: no additional Lulu,  42 total Lulu copies, 2,422(!) more (total 11,584* copies from my site: total 11,626 (actual total almost certainly over 12,000).
  • Subjects: No additional Lulu, 19 total Lulu copies, 82 additional, 293* other copies, 312* total.
  • Countries: No additional Lulu, 8 total Lulu copies, 112 additional, 1,166* total other copies, 1,174 total.
  • C&I: New totals 1,223* copies of the excerpted GOAJ version (16.5) and 3,999* copies of “APCLand and OAWorld” (16.4.)

*Missing downloads from 11/13-11/30/16 and, for C&I, 11/13-12/15/16.

Gray OA and the state of C&I

Gray OA 2011-2016 (Cites & Insights 17.1) shows a total of 818 downloads to date, and no apparent recognition anywhere else that the Shen/Bjork “predatory articles” numbers are demonstrated to be so dramatically wrong; the dataset shows 129 views and only 19 downloads. I’d already concluded that it was crazy to consider updating the study (which probably involved more work than GOAJ); the lack of interest confirms that conclusion–and, of course, the source material’s disappeared in any case.

As for C&I and the balance between new issues of that and work on the second edition of GOAJ (2012-2016, or maybe 2011-2016) can’t help but be swayed by the figures for C&I 17.2: 166 total to date. Issue 17.3 will emerge……..eventually.

Missing those lists? Never fear…

Tuesday, January 17th, 2017

It appears that the content in Beall’s blog disappeared a few days ago, including the notorious lists of ppppredatory publishers and journals.

I have no inside information as to what happened.

Here’s the thing, though:

In addition to the usual Internet Archive approach to finding slightly earlier versions of the lists, I can recommend the following–with the caveat that I regard the lists as useless and damaging as “blacklists” but useful as a broad directory of gray/gold OA (gold OA not in DOAJ):

  • There’s a spreadsheet including all the journals from both lists as of July 8, 2016–including publishers, journals, URLs, but also article counts for each journal for 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015, and the first half of 2016, as well as the current APC (as of late 2016) and my status code for each journal
  • Gray OA 2012-2016: Open Access Journals Beyond DOAJ, the January 2017 Cites & Insights, provides full analysis of this universe and how it meshes with the larger DOAJ universe, and even a breakdown of the vastly inflated “predatory” numbers in one piece of published research.

Both free, both CC-BY; the first is the master dataset for the second. Neither has been seen by all that many people, which is sort of a shame.

All times are UTC

Friday, January 13th, 2017

I use Chrome as my default browser while researching journals, because it makes it so easy to use the Google language tools to translate pages. Almost always, I can use the translation–and occasionally, as with Italian author guides, the translation has the feel of free verse.

Then there’s this–just encountered when checking
Herakleion : Revista Interdisciplinar de Historia y Arqueología del Mediterráneo, a Spanish journal.

One of the tabs is
Normas de Publicación
(which I already recognize as “publication norms” or author guidelines).
Translating the page yielded this:
All times are UTC
which is an…interesting…translation.

And no doubt true.

All of Gold OA?

Tuesday, January 10th, 2017

Given the recent publication of “Hybrid open access—A longitudinal study” by Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk, I thought it might be interesting to put together all the pieces: my study of DOAJ-listed journals, my study of “others” (using Beall’s generally pernicious lists as a source directory), and this study of hybrid articles.

Here’s what I come up with, complete for 2012 and 2013, partial for 2014 and 2015. “Questionable” for DOAJ includes journals with unstated/hidden APCs; for the gray segment, it includes a variety of things (see Table 3.4).

2012 2013 2013% 2014 2015 2015%
DOAJ

438,644

493,475

69.8%

560,036

566,922

65.0%

Gray/norm

69,075

98,679

14.0%

135,052

148,564

17.0%

SubNorm

507,719

592,154

83.8%

695,088

715,486

82.0%

DOAJ/Ques

10,539

10,896

1.5%

10,170

8,866

1.0%

Gray/Ques

55,964

89,966

12.7%

120,131

148,399

17.0%

SubQues

66,503

100,862

14.3%

130,301

157,265

18.0%

Hybrid

10,802

13,994

2.0%

Total

585,024

707,010

825,389

872,751

 

I believe this is as complete a picture of gold OA as we’re likely to get, although it does omit a few thousand articles where journals have malware or are otherwise resistant to article counts. I’d suggest a 5% margin of error—and also suggest, as I’ve long suspected, that hybrid OA is still within that margin of error, less than 5% of gold OA.

Moved, left no forwarding address? Bentham open

Monday, January 9th, 2017

I’m doing the 2016 DOAJ scan by publisher name–a publisher will frequently use the same APC placement and issue organization for all its journals, saving me time–and just reached Bentham Open, with about 70 journals (quite a few ceased).

And could reach NONE of the first 10…either DNS errors or timeouts. All with URLs starting either www.bentham.org/open/ or bentham.org/open

Just for fun, searched for Bentham Open…and got a site at benthamopen.com

So far, of the first 10 tried, the five that had already ceased have simply disappeared, while the other five can now be reached from the parent site at benthamopen.com

In no case do I see a stub site or autoforward–neither for the publisher (or “publisher”) as a whole nor for any of the journals.

At this point, I’ll do the 60 others by using the new parent site–but isn’t one mark of an even semi-reputable publisher that when you change URLs you don’t simply shut down the old site?

Or is “semi-reputable publisher” too kind a word in this case?


Added March 31, 2017:
It has been suggested that these issues were caused by an act of sabotage–a disgruntled ex-employee deleting information on their way out the door. I have no way of knowing whether this is true; if so, it would move the blame from Bentham itself to a lower level (and suggest inadequate backup/restore/security practices). [H/t to Richard Poynder for passing along the rumor.]

In any case, most Bentham journals are still in DOAJ and included in the forthcoming 2011-2016 study, found at new addresses.

A pence for your thoughts

Friday, January 6th, 2017

As I’m starting the long slog of adding 2016 data (and adding all data for just under 1,900 journals not there on 12/31/2015) to the spreadsheet for Gold Open Access [2011 or]2012-2016, I find the need for an early shoutout:

To The Journal of the Anthropological Society of Oxford for both the lowest Article Processing Charge I’ve seen and the best statement about the charge:

“We have introduced Author Publication Charges for all authors who consider they may be submitted to REF2020 from 1 April 2013 when the HEFCE rule comes into force. These are set at 1p sterling (£0.01), and should be paid in cash when the author bumps into one of the Editors or anyone who knows them. Why? Because on one interpretation of the guidelines only journals charging APCs are eligible.” http://www.isca.ox.ac.uk/publications/jaso/copyright-and-apcs/ 


Update, January 17, 2017: This was posted because I thought it was amusing and refreshing. But after it was picked up by better-known commentators (independently of my post or otherwise), the APC was dropped (they now interpret the guidelines differently).

Sort of a shame, that: humor in author guidelines is in perilously short supply.

Cites & Insights 17:2 (February 2017) available

Tuesday, January 3rd, 2017

Cites & Insights 17:2 (February 2017) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ17i2.pdf

The 30-page issue (6″ x 9″, single column, optimized for online/tablet reading) includes:

The Front  pp. 1-3

Announcing the 2016 Cites & Insights Annual and reduced prices for all C&I Annuals; also a change to CC BY (from CC BY-NC) and partial readership notes.

Technology  pp. 4-18

Eleven little items spotlighting older (but still relevant) items–and an update on the bandwidth of a 747: it’s now 4.7 petabits per second (New York to LA), assuming consumer media–namely a whole bunch of 4 terabyte solid state drives. (As before, the limiting factor is always weight, not space.)

The Back  pp. 18-30

The annual update to The Money of Music, and eleven other items or groups of items.

The next issue will probably be on Economics and Access. When that will be…well, I’ve started the scan for Gold Open Access Journals 2012-2016 (that might turn out to be 2011-2016 if I can figure out how to make the tables readable), and we’ll see how that goes.

Last year in books read

Sunday, January 1st, 2017

Given the sheer amount of research I did in 2016–Gold Open Access Journals 2011-2015 and Gray OA 2012-2016–it’s a miracle I managed to get through any books at all. But I did.

As usual, my goal was 39 books: three books for each 4-week library circulation period. As usual, I did better than that, although nowhere near as well as in 2015: Looks like I started 49 books and finished 45 of them. Abandoned, for various reasons: Reinhart & Rogoff: This Time is Different; Graydon Carter: Bohemians, Bootleggers, Flappers & Swells; Peter Carey: Amnesia.

Books I thoroughly enjoyed:

The Days of Anna Madrigal Armistead Maupin
When Christ and the Saints Slept Sharon Kay Penman
The Truth According to Us Annie Barrows
Strip Tease Carl Hiaasen
School Days Robert B. Parker
Sixkill Robert B. Parker
Walking Shadow Robert B. Parker
Ring of Fire III Eric Flint
1635: A Parcel of Rogues Erik Flint &c.
1636: The Viennese Waltz Erik Flint &c.

Books I enjoyed a lot but which weren’t quite as good:

Saint Mazie Jami Attenberg
Maybe the Moon Armistead Maupin
The Devil’s Bones Jefferson Bass
I Don’t Know How She Does It Allison Pearson
All Our Yesterdays Robert B. Parker
Lucky You Carl Hiaasen
Time and Chance Sharon Kay Penman
Sick Puppy Carl Hiaasen
Thin Air Robert B. Parker
Trouble in Paradise Robert B. Parker
Small Vices Robert B. Parker
Playmafes Robert B. Parker
Hard Drive James Wallace & Jim Erickson
Service Included Phoebe Damrosch
1635: The Dreeson Incident Erik Flint &c.
Ring of Fire II Eric Flint
1635: The Papal Stakes Erik Flint &c.
1636: The Saxon Uprising Eric Flint
1636: The Kremlin Games Erik Flint & c.

Those are the “A” and “A-” grades; another nine were also enjoyable but B+ at best.

Of course, I also wrote three books, but that’s another story.

[If you looked at this and saw two identical tables: brief problem…]