GOA8: New direction on countries?

A fleshed-out version of this appears here.

The “country book” portion of the GOA series has been relatively little-used. For GOA7, I changed it significantly, making it a guide to “the long tail” by region and country, eliminating the Big Eleven OA publishers.

That hasn’t helped. Nobody’s purchased a book and there have been very few free downloads.

The question now is what to do in GOA8. My agreement only calls for the data gathering and analysis, shared dataset, and the free ebook and nominally-priced paperback for GOA in general. I believe the country-by-country rundown can be valuable, but only if it’s being used.

I see three possibilities for GOA8, once the general project is done (still no schedule, but right now very late spring is looking more possible–the next six weeks will tell a lot). Here are the three options:

  1. Drop the detailed country analysis completely.
  2. Try the “long tail” one more time.
  3. Diamond Open Access 2017-2022: Articles in No-Fee Jourrnals: Basically take the subset of the overall dataset that consists of no-fee journals (most journals, but not most articles), and do a new book that includes shorter versions of portions of the general GOA8 (probably not including subject chapters), and add (shorter) chapters for all countries with at least 10 no-fee journals.

That overall analysis would, I believe, show a sharp shift toward eastern and southern regions, and some other sharp shifts. (E.g., toward humanities and social sciences.) And yes, I would use the D-word.

Please forward this to anyone you know who might find the results useful and might use them. I will rely on feedback–here in the short term, as email (waltcrawford@gmail.com) or on Mastodon (guess my handle there!) in the longer run. I might even check the Muskbird. Or maybe not.

[If you’re wondering: the Week Six wrapup will be on Saturday as usual. It will include fewer journals than last week but more than I was expecting.]

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