Archive for October, 2020

There will be a GOA6

Tuesday, October 27th, 2020

Thanks to SPARC’s continuing support, there will be a Gold Open Access 2015-2020: Articles in Journals appearing sometime in the summer of 2021 (barring health or other disasters).

The study will follow the same pattern as GOA5. I’ll download DOAJ metadata in late December 2020 to the first match and consistency checking, and will determine currency exchange rates to be used for the project (as with this year, they’ll be the median 2020 rate where that’s available, the rate on the December date I check them otherwise–and they’ll be on a tab in the freely-available spreadsheet). Then I’ll download data again shortly after midnight (GMT) on January 1, 2021, and process changes.

I currently plan two changes–neither major. First, I’m finishing the process of getting rid of “Miscellaneous” as a publisher category. (It accounted for considerably less than 1% of articles in GOA5.) Any publishers not categorized as university/college, society/government, or traditional publisher, will be marked as Open Access.

Second, I sense that a few subject-assignment errors crept in some years ago (due to quirks in Excel at the time). I’ve already rechecked subject assignments against the DOAJ-supplied subject information for all journals in GOA5, changing a few dozen in the process, and will complete that process in January. (The changes would only be significant in subject breakdowns for a few countries.)

Other than those changes, I’ll aim for consistency, and add a sixth row to graphs in a Six-Year Comparisons chapter. Once again, the data will be freely available at Figshare (or some other repository), the report will be available as a free PDF or a cost-of-publication color trade paperback, and there will be a Country of Publication report.

I won’t even begin to guess dates or volume. I’d love to see it emerge in July 2021, but won’t predict that. I’d love to see at least 15,000 fully-analyzed journals–and that seems fairly plausible. I’d guess there will be more than 900,000 2020 articles, but would be loath to project a million. We shall see.

Posted in Books and publishing, open access | Comments Closed

$peaker$ and cable$: a fun post

Wednesday, October 7th, 2020

Just to get away from the madness for a little while…

An audio magazine I currently receive published a special issue consisting mostly of directories of speakers, subwoofers, and cables from companies the magazine regards as worthy. Oh, and lots and lots of full-page ads from many of those companies,

The directory covers 96 speaker companies (and three that only produce subwoofers, which I’m not dealing with here) and 31 cable companies.

I believe speakers are one area of high fidelity where you can probably keep getting better performance for more money for a very large span of “more money,” although for most of us the point of diminishing returns would come fairly early (as might the point at which we could clearly appreciate a difference).

Even so, some of the numbers are, well, at least interesting.

Speaker prices

  • Only 22 of the 96 companies have any speakers costing less than $1,500/pair.
  • 28 of the 96 have no speakers costing less than $10,000/pair. (The company I’d likely buy from if I had great wealth and needed a really good pair of speakers doesn’t have any speakers costing $10,000/pair or more…)
  • 47 of the 96–nearly half–had at least one pair of speakers costing $50,000/pair or more.
  • I saw 34 speakers costing $100,000 to $199,000 per pair…
  • …and 28 speakers costing $200,000 to $499,000 per pair…
  • …and four costing at least half a million dollars per pair (“at least” because several speakers had “price on request” or some other version of “if you have to ask”).
  • Two of the speakers cost more than $800,000 per pair. Eight hundred thousand dollars.
  • At least five of the speakers weigh half a ton or more; not clear whether that’s per-speaker or per-pair.

Cables (10ft or 2meter speaker pairs or one-meter interconnects)

Almost all of these noted below are speaker cables. I believe each of these prices would need to be doubled for a pair of speakers, but I could be wrong:

  • 26 cables cost $10,000-$19,999.
  • Another 26 cost $20,000-$49,999.
  • Three cost $50,000 or more. For a speaker cable or cables. But hey, if you’re spending $855,000 for speakers (the top price I saw), what’s another $50,000 or $100,000 for cables?

I offer no comment.

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Gold Open Access 5: September 2020 report

Friday, October 2nd, 2020

Readership for GOA5, plus continuing reporting on GOA4.

All links available from the project home page, as always.

GOA5: 2014-2019

  • The dataset: 223 views, 39 downloads–and some unknown number of uses from a third-party dashboard incorporating the dataset.
  • GOA5: 406 PDF ebooks. Two paperbacks (full color, highly recommended).
  • Countries 5: 57 PDF ebooks

GOA4: 2013-2018

  • The dataset: 774 views, 302 downloads.
  • GOA4: 3,581 PDF ebooks
  • Countries 4: 553 PDF ebooks
  • Subjects and Publishers: 441 PDF ebooks



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