Archive for June, 2022

Gold Open Access by Country 2016-2021 is out

Wednesday, June 22nd, 2022

Gold Open Access by Country 2016-2021: The Long Tail is now available as a free PDF ebook or a $7.50 trade paperback.

As always, links to the PDF and to the paperback are at https://waltcrawford.name/goaj.html

I’ll have more to say about it later, probably. For now, I’ll say that focusing on the long tail offers what I regard as a more realistic view of where OA is happening, by excluding the “big eleven” megapublishers. [For one example: including all publishers, Switzerland is by far the largest source of OA articles and Brazil is fourth; for the long tail, Brazil is first, Indonesia is fourth, and Switzerland is 32nd. The UK and US are 2nd and 3rd in both cases–but the US is second in the long tail, while the UK is second including all publishers. For another: the average cost per article is $1,374 for all publishers and $336 for the long tail.]

No graphs, a ridiculous number of tables, 259 pages on 60lb. cream paper, with what may finally be an interesting heatmap on the front cover.

Doing another project this year?

Saturday, June 4th, 2022

I’ll be done with GOA7 in a few more weeks (late June or early July barring major surprises), and will probably spend a few months reading a lot more, watching a little more TV, possibly dealing with some household and personal maintenance issues, and determining whether to propose GOA8.

That last depends on whether I believe I can do a good job (am up to it mentally, physically, and in terms of other demands), whether it still seems to be valuable, and whether I’d still have funding.

Meanwhile–let’s say in the time between July 15 and December 15–I could take on another project, if there was one that made sense for all concerned. That is: something where my remaining skills would yield worthwhile results, that wouldn’t be stepping on Proper (Paper-Oriented) Research, that would be financially supported, and would interest me.

I don’t know what that might be, if anything, but thought I’d put it out there. I thought about investigating the “rest of ROAD,” that is, what are all those other OA journals, why aren’t they in DOAJ, do they publish a lot of articles…etc, But ROAD doesn’t appear to have downloadable metadata, and I’m not sure where such a project would lead.

That’s one example. There might be others. If you’re interested, get in touch (waltcrawford@gmail.com). I won’t be holding my breath.