Walt at Random

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.

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.

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).

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.

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.

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.