I’m making good progress on GOA7–the book. Barring huge disruptions in the next few weeks–not a safe bet–it should be ready (and the dataset published) in early June. Possibly even very late May, but don’t quote me on that. (Then, after resting for a couple of days, comes the subject book.)
I don’t include political commentary in the book, but not because I don’t have feelings, politics in this case being the politics of OA publishing and funding. So there won’t be any notes on the subversion of the OA vision by Big Publishers, even if the potential revenue from author-side fees did increase by nearly half a billion dollars from 2020 to 2021 (to roughly one and three quarters billion).
And “Big Publishers” is a tricky term in this case: MDPI, not a traditional publisher at all, appears to have taken in around $540 million in 2021–up more than $200 million from 2020 (partly by publishing a lot more articles, partly by a $255 increase in average cost per article). MDPI now publishes more DOAJ-listed OA articles than all of the Holtzbrinck Group (Springer, Nature, Frontiers, BMC).
But the book is, as usual, mostly lots of tables and graphs with limited commentary–describing what is, not what I think it should be.
Enough for now. Back to the book.
