[GOAL] How Frequently are Articles in Predatory Open Access Journals Cited ?

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear All,

We have recently finished a study which we believe provides a new important 
angle on the issue of predatory publishing of scholarly OA journals. Since the 
process from submission to publication in a journal may take a long time, we 
have opted to upload the preprint working paper already now to arXiv. While the 
review process may entail some changes to the text of the article, the main 
results and conclusions are likely to remain the same. Feel free to resend this 
message to colleagues you think might be interested.

Bo-Christer Björk, Sari Kanto-Karvinen and J. Tuomas Harviainen

How Frequently are Articles in Predatory Open Access Journals Cited

Abstract

Predatory journals are Open Access journals of highly questionable scientific 
quality. Such journals pretend to use peer review for quality assurance, and 
spam academics with requests for submissions, in order to collect author 
payments.  In recent years predatory journals have received a lot of negative 
media. While much has been said about the harm that such journals cause to 
academic publishing in general, an overlooked aspect is how much articles in 
such journals are actually read and in particular cited, that is if they have 
any significant impact on the research in their fields. Other studies have 
already demonstrated that only some of the articles in predatory journals 
contain faulty and directly harmful results, while a lot of the articles 
present mediocre and poorly reported studies. We studied citation statistics 
over a five-year period in Google Scholar for 250 random articles published in 
such journals in 2014, and found an average of 2,6 citations per article and 
that 60 % of the articles had no citations at all. For comparison a random 
sample of articles published in the approximately 25,000 peer reviewed journals 
included in the Scopus index had an average of 18,1 citations in the same 
period with only 9 % receiving no citations. We conclude that articles 
published in predatory journals have little scientific impact.

https://arxiv.org/abs/1912.10228

Best regards Bo-Christer

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[GOAL] Study of the prevalance of OA journals in different scientific disciplines

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear readers of this list,

Together with Timo Korkeamäki we have carried out a study looking at the 
prevalance of OA journals in different scientific disciplines. An article 
reporting the results has just been accepted for publishing in the OA journal 
College & Research Libraries, but since the article is due to be published only 
in November 2020 and the journal doesn’t publish e-versions ahead of the 
scheduled issues, we have uploaded the accepted version to the institutional 
repository of my university. The abstract is:

Adoption of the open access business model in scientific journal publishing – A 
cross-disciplinary study

Scientific journal publishers have over the past twenty-five years rapidly 
converted to predominantly electronic dissemination, but the reader-pays 
business model continues to dominate the market. Open Access (OA) publishing, 
where the articles are freely readable on the net, has slowly increased its 
market share to near 20%, but has failed to fulfill the visions of rapid 
proliferation predicted by many early proponents. The growth of OA has also 
been very uneven across fields of science. We report market shares of open 
access in eighteen Scopus-indexed disciplines ranging from 27% (agriculture) to 
7% (business). The differences become far more pronounced for journals 
published in the four countries, which dominate commercial scholarly publishing 
(US, UK, Germany and the Netherlands). We present contrasting developments 
within six academic disciplines. Availability of funding to pay publication 
charges, pressure from research funding agencies, and the diversity of 
discipline-specific research communication cultures arise as potential 
explanations for the observed differences.

The green version can be accessed at 
https://haris.hanken.fi/portal/files/11186226/Bjo_rk_Korkeama_ki_2020_a_Green_version.pdf

feel free to forward this message to potentially interested collegues.

At the same time I wish all readers of this list a Merry Christmas and a Happy 
New Year

Bo-Christer Björk
Hanken School of Economics






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[GOAL] New green copies

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear all,

The following recently published articles of mine are now available as green 
versions at the site http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/, managed by David 
Solomon
Scholarly journal publishing in transition– from restricted to open access,
Electronic Markets, The International Journal on Networked Business

Gold, Green and Black Open Access,
Learned Publishing

Open Access to scientific articles – a review of benefits and challenges,
Internal and Emergency Medicine
(Note that this last article is more like a tutoral aimed at medical 
practitioners)

best regards
 Bo-Christer Björk

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Re: [GOAL] Elsevier as an open access publisher

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Hi,

before jumping to any sorts of conclusions, it important to look at what kind 
of journasl published by Elsevier are full OA (and often without APCs). A quick 
look at the list at 
https://www.elsevier.com/about/open-science/open-access/open-access-journals, 
shows that many are society or university journals from different parts of the 
world, mainly from outside the USA, UK etc. These journals are free to publish 
in because they are sponsored by the societies in question. If somebody did a 
study of the regional distribution of authorship in these I’d suspect that the 
authorship was strongly skewed to the countries and regions of the societies. 
I’m also pretty certain that the average article volume are lower the the 
Elsevier average.

Remember the silly controversy caused by Jeffrey Beall’s characterising Scielo 
as a publication favela, where he recommended for local journals to partner 
with the internally leading publishers instead? We’ll this shows an in-between 
option. Unfortunately the option is probably not open to all journals, again 
without doing an analysis, I would guess there is a strong bias towards 
biomedicine and well established journals, which would be attractive for a big 
commercial publisher to have in its portfolio.

Bo-Christer


On 13 Jan 2017, at 18:57, Heather Morrison 
mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>> wrote:

Elsevier is now one of the world’s largest open access publishers as measured 
by the number of fully OA journals published. What are the implications? I’d 
love to hear your thoughts, on list or on the SKC blogpost (see link below).

Morrison, H. (2017). From the field: Elsevier as an open access publisher. The 
Charleston Advisor 18:3, pp. 53-59 doi https://doi.org/10.5260/chara.18.3.53 

Abstract:

Highlights of this broad-brush case study of Elsevier’s Open Access (OA) 
journals as of 2016: Elsevier offers 511 fully OA journals and 2,149 hybrids. 
Most fully OA journals do not charge article processing charges (APCs). APCs of 
fully OA journals average $660 US ($1,731 excluding no-fee journals); hybrid OA 
averages $2,500. A practice termed author nominal copyright is observed, where 
copyright is in the name of the author although the author contract is 
essentially a copyright transfer. The prospects for a full Elsevier flip to OA 
via APC payments for articles going forward are considered and found to be 
problematic.

Sustaining Knowledge Commons blogpost for comments:
https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2017/01/13/elsevier-as-an-open-access-publisher/

best,

Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
heather.morri...@uottawa.ca



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[GOAL] {Disarmed} Fwd: Message from Mike Jensen, SSRN Chairman

[Bo-Christer Björk]

This is an interesting news item which should interest the readers of 
this list. Let's hope arXiv is not for sale.


Bo-Christer Björk



 Forwarded Message 
Subject:Message from Mike Jensen, SSRN Chairman
Date:   Tue, 17 May 2016 07:40:29 -0400 (EDT)
From:   Michael C. Jensen 
Reply-To:   supp...@ssrn.com
To: bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi



<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://www.ssrn.com> 
	



Dear SSRN Authors,

SSRN announced today that it has changed ownership. SSRN is joining 
Mendeley <https://www.mendeley.com/?signout> and Elsevier 
<https://www.elsevier.com> to coordinate our development and delivery of 
new products and services, and we look forward to our new access to 
data, products, and additional resources that this change facilitates. 
(See Gregg Gordon’s Elsevier Connect 
<https://www.elsevier.com/connect/ssrn-the-leading-social-science-and-humanities-repository-and-online-community-joins-elsevier> 
post)


Like SSRN, Mendeley and Elsevier are focused on creating tools that 
enhance researcher workflow and productivity. SSRN has been at the 
forefront of on-line sharing of working papers. We are committed to 
continue our innovation and this change will enable that to happen more 
quickly. SSRN will benefit from access to the vast new data and 
resources available, including Mendeley’s reference management and 
personal library management tools, their new researcher profile 
capabilities, and social networking features. Importantly, we will also 
have new access for SSRN members to authoritative performance 
measurement tools such as those powered by Scopus 
<https://www.elsevier.com/solutions/scopus> and Newsflo 
<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://www.newsflo.net> 
(a global media tracking tool). In addition, SSRN, Mendeley and Elsevier 
together can cooperatively build bridges to close the divide between the 
previously separate worlds and workflows of working papers and published 
papers.


We realize that this change may create some concerns about the 
intentions of a legacy publisher acquiring an open-access working paper 
repository. I shared this concern. But after much discussion about this 
matter and others in determining if Mendeley and Elsevier would be a 
good home for SSRN, I am convinced that they would be good stewards of 
our mission. And our copyright policies are not in conflict -- our 
policy has always been to host only papers that do not infringe on 
copyrights. I expect we will have some conflicts as we align our 
interests, but I believe those will be surmountable.


Until recently I was convinced that the SSRN community was best served 
being a stand-alone entity. But in evaluating our future in the evolving 
landscape, I came to believe that SSRN would benefit from being more 
interconnected and with the resources available from a larger 
organization. For example, there is scale in systems administration and 
security, and SSRN can provide more value to users with access to more 
data and resources.


On a personal note, it has been an honor to be involved over the past 25 
years in the founding and growth of the SSRN website and the incredible 
community of authors, researchers and institutions that has made this 
all possible. I consider it one of my great accomplishments in life. The 
community would not have been successful without the commitment of so 
many of you who have contributed in so many ways. I am proud of the 
community we have created, and I invite you to continue your involvement 
and support in this effort.


The staff at SSRN are all staying (including Gregg Gordon, CEO and 
myself), the Rochester office is still in place, it will still be free 
to upload and download papers, and we remain committed to “Tomorrow’s 
Research Today”. I look forward to and am committed to a successful 
transition and to another great 25 years for the SSRN community that 
rivals the first.


Michael C. Jensen
Founder & Chairman, SSRN





Search the SSRN eLibrary 
<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://papers.ssrn.com/> 
| Browse SSRN 
<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/DisplayJournalBrowse.cfm> 
| Top Papers 
<http://hq.ssrn.com/GroupProcesses/RedirectClick.cfm?partid=2338421&corid=4024&runid=15740&url=http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/topten/topTenPapers.cfm>


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[GOAL] New article about "Indie" OA journals

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Hi,

The followers of this list are probably interested in the following 
article, just published

A longitudinal study of independent scholar-published open access journals
Bo-Christer Björk, Cenyu Shen​, Mikael Laakso
Peer J, https://peerj.com/articles/1990/

Best regards
Bo-Christer


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Re: [GOAL] Request Your Help for an open access study on non-English-language journals

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear Jean-Claude,

Thanks. We have Redalyc on our list

Best regards

Bo-Christer

On 3/11/16 4:57 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:

Do not forget Redalyc in Mexico.


Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal

Le vendredi 11 mars 2016 à 12:04 +0200, Cenyu Shen a écrit :

Dear recipient,

We have started a study to look at a subset of Open Access scholarly
journal publishing, which we feel has been overlooked in much of the
published research, namely OA journals published in other languages
than English. We include both newly started electronic only OA
journals, as well as older print journals that have started to make
the e-version free. The vast majority of these probably don?t charge
authors. There are a number of reasons there have been few results
about the overall extent of such publishing etc. One is that many
leading researchers come from countries where English is the main
language, and many studies have from the start been restricted to such
only journals publishing in English, in order to facilitate the
gathering of data. Another is that non-English journals are likely to
be underrepresented in all the available indexes, including the DOAJ.

We have so far indentified two easy ways to find information about
such journals. The first is using DOAJ and its search facilities. The
second one is using the OA journal portals we are aware of, such as
Scielo, J-stage, doiSerbia etc. In addition to this there are many
countries, which don?t have such portals and we would like also to get
information from those. For this purpose we try to contact experts who
we believe have good knowledge of the situation in their countries and
could provide us links to list of all reputable scholarly journals in
their country, lists of OA journals etc.

Countries which interest us in particular are: Canada, Most European
countries (except the UK) and including Russia, Francophone countries
in Africa, Middle East and Asian Countries.

We will use three ways to contact volunteers who can help us:

Contact with the management of DOAJ and its voluntary editorial staff
An email to The Global Open Access List (GOAL)
Direct e-mail to people we know

If you feel you are in a position to provide us information, please
contact us by e-mail

Cenyu Shen, Ph.D. Student
Principal researcher
cenyu.s...@hanken.fi <mailto:cenyu.s...@hanken.fi>

Bo-Christer Björk, Professor
bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi <mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi>

Mikael Laakso, Assistant Professor
mikael.laa...@hanken.fi <mailto:mikael.laa...@hanken.fi>

Information Systems Science
Dept. of Management and Organisation
Hanken School of Economics
P.O. Box 479, 00101 Helsinki, Finland



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[GOAL] Re: Elsevier in Africa!

[Bo-Christer Björk]

To me its very clear how publishers like Elsevier operate. Their only 
obligation is shareholder value, that is profits. Both selling 
subscription e-licenses and APC the strategy is clear. Each dollar they 
can extract from clients above the marginal costs of the service 
increases their profits. So even a low priced (APC) journal for African 
authors is worthwhile if it cheap to run (and megajournals are cheaper 
and also enjoy returns to scale). And these are dollars which Elsevier 
won't get otherwise. It's like airplane ticketing.


Merry Christmas to you all on the list

Bo-Christer Björk



 On 12/23/15 11:12 AM, Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou wrote:


Alicia,
I am glad that a member of elsevier reacts to my claim. Clearly for 
your project in Africa, is it possible for you to respect these 
following conditions:


- free APC journal
- the green éditorial policy of DOAJ
- embargo periods of no more than 6 months.

In the post cited before, Elsevier wants to help Africa by making the 
research more visible, but if african authors have to pay, you will 
not resolve the problem because, I can publish my work in elsevier 
journals in the world since I have money to pay charges.


So it is more just, I want to say for cognitive justice make 
difference in Africa, and you can do it.


My holiday will be peaceful and relaxing, the day that you will 
consider these conditions for your African Journal.


Hi Thomas -

All our authors, no matter where in the world they are, have both gold 
and green Open Access publishing options.


With best wishes for a peaceful and relaxing holiday season,

Alicia


On 22 Dec 2015, at 17:39, Thomas Hervé Mboa Nkoudou 
mailto:thomasm...@gmail.com>> wrote:



On this post,

http://www.scidev.net/global/publishing/news/elsevier-african-open-access-journal.html, 



Elsevier plans an African Open Journals, using the Gold voice. But 
for me, it is not the right way for us (Africa).


I want all GOAL members to join me in an open letter adressed to 
Elsevier, with the objective to claim the full green voice for Africa.


Since I am an African searcher, your support will be helpful

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Elsevier Limited. Registered Office: The Boulevard, Langford Lane, 
Kidlington, Oxford, OX5 1GB, United Kingdom, Registration No. 1982084, 
Registered in England and Wales.



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[GOAL] Re: Inside Higher Ed: All six editors and all 31 editorial board members of Lingua resign over Elsevier

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Hi,

It's ironical that Lingua very visibly on it's home page claims to 
"support Open access" !! The price is 1800 USD excluding taxes, and a 
few authors seem to have paid up.


Since all editors and editorial members have resigned the most effective 
policy is for scholars in that field to stop submitting and reviewing 
papers to the journal, this is more realistic than trying to influence 
librarians around the globe.


Bo-Christer


On 11/13/15 5:44 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
Removing access simply means "stop subscribing". Libraries stop 
subscribing to journals all the time (in particular because they 
cannot pay for them).


If stopping a subscription is equivalent to "book banning", then one 
can say anything in English (or any other language for that matter).


And thank you to Stevan Harnad for using language correctly, as well 
as correctly underscoring the real meaning of  my phrasing.



Jean-Claude Guédon
Professeur titulaire
Littérature comparée
Université de Montréal


Le vendredi 13 novembre 2015 à 10:05 -0430, Jacinto Dávila a écrit :
Mr Beall, as usual, picks his words as hostile as possible to address 
this OA community. Calling Jean-Claude Guedon a book banner is like 
calling Nelson Mandela a criminal. It is just not true and it tries 
to ride the waves of a very disturbing discussion. I am asking him to 
show some respect or to leave this email list. And he can call me a 
list banner if he wants. 

On 13 November 2015 at 09:37, Stevan Harnad > wrote: 


"Remove Access" would of course be absurd, and completely
contrary to the spirit of OA (but that's not what J-CG meant). 




"Cease to Pay for Access," on the other hand, is a call for a
perfectly valid and longstanding judgment-call by library serial
acquisitions committees, in consultation with their user
community, as to how they spend their serials budget. 




The valuable historical service Jeffery Beall is providing by
warning about scam Gold OA journals (though it would be even more
useful if extended to all journals, whether OA or toll-access) is
compromised by his inexplicable hostility to OA itself and his
equally inexplicable fealty to subscription publishers and their
M.O. 




But calling an Open Access advocate the equivalent of a
book-banner takes the (vegan) cake... 




SH 



On Fri, Nov 13, 2015 at 6:54 AM, Beall, Jeffrey
mailto:jeffrey.be...@ucdenver.edu>>
wrote:

I think that Guedon's advice to "Remove access to /Lingua/
going forward" is the moral equivalent of a book banning.



There's no moral difference between saying "Remove access to
/Lingua/" and saying "Remove the book /Heather Has Two Mommies/."



I understand that all book banners (and journal banners)
think they are doing the right thing and helping society.



I think it is shameful for anyone, especially a librarian, to
call for the removal of content from a library.



Guedon is the modern-day equivalent of a book banner. He is
pressuring libraries to ban serials, the same, morally, as
banning books.



Jeffrey Beall

University of Colorado Denver



*From:* goal-boun...@eprints.org

[mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org
] *On Behalf Of *Richard Poynder
*Sent:* Thursday, November 12, 2015 11:59 PM
*To:* 'Global Open Access List' mailto:goal@eprints.org>>
*Subject:* [GOAL] Inside Higher Ed: All six editors and all
31 editorial board members of Lingua resign over Elsevier




*I am posting this message on behalf of Jean-Claude Guédon:*





The article below (thanks to Colin Steele) is an example of a
courageous move that must be supported by the libraries.

With regard to the /Lingua/ (now /Glossa/) editorial board,
libraries could, for example,

1. Remove access to/Lingua/ going forward (keep access to
archive up to December 31st, 2015) if caught in a Big Deal;
remove /Lingua/ from subscriptions, starting in 2016, if not
in a Big Deal

2. Support /Glossa/ (the new journal) financially,

3. Promote /Glossa/ widely. ERIH is already classifying the
new journal at the level of its current status by arguing
that the quality of a journal is linked to the editors and
editorial board, and not to the publisher.

Researchers in linguistics, of course, should boycott
Elsevier's /Lingua/ from now on.

This event also demonstrates the importance for Learned and
scientific societies not to sell the title of their journals
to publishers. So long as we foolishly evaluate research
according to the place where it is published (i.e. a journal
title), publishers will hold 

[GOAL] Re: One way to expand the OA movement: be more inclusive

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear all,

I agree with Heather that we should take a more inclusive approach to 
Open Access. For most ordinary academics and non-academics all that 
counts is getting access to particular articles they want to read that 
more often than not are identified via references.

The landscape is not black and white. Most of Green OA for reasons of 
embargoes and author behavior is delayed OA.

In a study we made a couple of years ago (Delayed Open Access – an 
overlooked high-impact category of openly available scientific literature
Mikael Laakso and Bo-Christer Björk)  we estimated that of the citations 
(not cited articles) in Web of Knowledge in the last available year:

80 % pointed to articles in closed subscription journals (of which some 
may be found as green copies)

6 % pointed to articles in immediate OA journals

14 % pointed to articles in delayed OA journals with embargo periods of 
max 12 months. This is due to the fact that many of the some 500 delayed 
OA journals that we found were high volume and impact.

The figures might look a bit different today but the overall picture is 
the same. To me it is clear that the reading of scholarly articles that 
you track via citations is a very important part of the all reading of 
scholarly articles.

Bo-Christer Björk

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[GOAL] Re: Who benefits from for-profit open access publishing? A case study of Hindawi and Egypt

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Hi all,

The 1500 USD charged by Hindawi for the journal in question is by global 
standards fairly reasonable, given the impact factor level of the 
journal. The problem is that uniform APCs for all countries is probably 
unsustainable in the long run. For this reason many gold OA journals 
give Waivers for authors from developing countries. In this particular 
case authors from around 60 countries, mainly from Africa and Asia and 
curiously also Ukraine can get waivers. Egypt alas is not on the 
relevant World Bank list.

The leading publishers do not charge the same amounts for big deal 
subscription licenses in different countries, but take into account the 
potential customers ability to pay (its a bit like airline ticketing). 
Likewise I would hope that if we convert to a dominating APC funded gold 
OA solution, then OA publishers will develop more tieried APC schemes 
than the current binominal full APC- waiver one. There are already some 
examples of policies with at least three levels.

Bo-Christer Björk


On 4/11/15 5:58 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:
> David, Jan & Peter: thank you for your comments. I agree with some of what 
> you say, would like to point to where we said basically the same things in 
> the original post. and have some comments to add:
>
> Agreed - Hindawi has a deserved reputation as a leader in scholarly 
> publishing, and in particular for commitment to quality. I also acknowledge 
> that Egyptian researchers can benefit by reading the OA works of others. 
> Following are words to this effect from the original blogpost:
>
> Details, first paragraph: "Hindawi is an open access commercial publishing 
> success story and an Egyptian business success story. Hindawi Publishing 
> Corporation was founded by Ahmed Hindawi who, in an interview with Richard 
> Poynder conducted in September 2012, confirmed a revenue of millions of 
> dollars from APCs alone – a $3.3 net profit on $12 million in revenue, a 28% 
> profit rate (Poynder, 2012). Hindawi is highly respected in open access 
> publishing circles, and was an early leader in establishing the Open Access 
> Scholarly Publishers’ Association (OASPA), an organization that takes quality 
> in publishing seriously". Towards the end: "Egyptian researchers can read 
> open access works of others".
> http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/04/10/who-is-served-by-for-profit-gold-open-access-publishing-a-case-study-of-hindawi-and-egypt/
>
> David Prosser said: "I know of no country where APCs are mainly paid from 
> academic salaries.  In the same way that centrifuges, reagents, etc., etc. 
> tend not to be paid for from salaries.  They are mainly paid from research 
> grants and so the comparison to salaries strikes me as meaningless".
>
> Comment: one way to think of this is that there are larger pools of funds 
> from which both academic salaries and monies for other expenses (including 
> APCs, subscription payments, reagents) are drawn. I argue that providing 
> funds for research per se is a necessary precondition to dissemination of 
> research results. I further argue that research funders working in the 
> developing world will be more effective if they prioritize funding for 
> academic salaries, student support,  and other direct supports for actually 
> doing the research, rather than paying APCs. A subsidy of two APCs for 
> Hindawi's Disease Markers - or a single APC of $3,000 charged by some other 
> publishers - would pay a year's salary for a lecturer position in Egypt.
>
> Of course I am Canadian, have never been to Egypt, and do not speak Arabic. I 
> am merely commenting on the impact of a model that I am viewing from a 
> distance. To understand what is best for Egypt and her researchers requires 
> in-depth knowledge of the country, consultation with and ideally leadership 
> by Egyptian researchers themselves.
>
> best,
>
> Heather Morrison
>
>
>
>
>
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[GOAL] Re: The dramatic growth of BioMedCentral's open access article processing charges

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Hi all,

An interesting discussion. My perspective is not a moral one. The APC 
charged should as far as possible reflect the quality and services of 
the journal. The current full OA market (for APC journals) is a 
relatively competive microeconomic market where customers(=authors) 
decide where to submit in a situation where they usually have several 
journals (some OA, most not ) to choose from. Quite in contrast to the 
oligopolistic subscription market or the strange hybrid OA market. So if 
BMC have in fact managed to establish their better journals as high 
quality outlets there is no problem in rising prices. The authors 
dedice. I don't think the UK funders decisions have yet had much impact 
on the funding.


I've personally paid APCs (or my department) for two articles in PLoS 
and two in BMC journals nd I've found the benefit/cost ratio to be 
excellent in all cases. In contrast I've made several grave mistakes in 
the choice of where to submit to in subscription journals. Those 
journals don't charge but there are high opportunity costs in delayed 
publication, low visibility etc.


As to the question of rising costs due to higher rejection rates I find 
this to be a largely unsubstantiated claim. The IT infra is already paid 
for, copy editing and invoicing costs only depend on the published 
papers. Almost all of the costs of desk rejected manuscripts and 
manuscripts rejected after long review processes are born by unpaid 
academic editors and reviewers, that is the global scholarly community.


Best regards

Bo-Christer

On 2/28/14 3:50 PM, Heather Morrison wrote:

hi Jan,

Good question! No, I have not looked into whether BMC's rejection 
rates have increased.


Whether this would be an acceptable reason for increasing prices at 
all, or at a particular rate, is a different question.


For example, unlike a print-based journal with size constraints 
imposed by the need to bundle articles into mailable issues, an online 
open access journal can easily increase in scale with more 
submissions. PLOS ONE has demonstrated the potential for translating 
rapid growth in submissions to rapid journal growth, with no price 
increase, technological innovations, and a more than healthy surplus.


Best,

Heather Morrison


On Feb 28, 2014, at 7:08 AM, "Frantsvåg Jan Erik" 
mailto:jan.e.frants...@uit.no>> wrote:



Interesting numbers!

Have you investigated if some of this increase could be explained by 
an increased rejection rate? -- this would be an acceptable 
explanation, in my opinion.


The suspicion is, of course, that this could be one result of e.g. 
the RCUK OA policy, which creates a less competitive market and 
better conditions for generating super-profits.


I think it was Guédon who asked why currency fluctuations always led 
to price increases ... J


Best,

Jan Erik

Jan Erik Frantsvåg

Open Access adviser

The University Library of Tromsø

phone +47 77 64 49 50

e-mail jan.e.frants...@uit.no 

http://en.uit.no/ansatte/organisasjon/ansatte/person?p_document_id=43618&p_dimension_id=88187

Publications: http://tinyurl.com/6rycjns

*Fra:*goal-boun...@eprints.org  
[mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *På vegne av* Heather Morrison

*Sendt:* 28. februar 2014 00:54
*Til:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
*Emne:* [GOAL] The dramatic growth of BioMedCentral's open access 
article processing charges


Thanks to the University of Ottawa's open sharing of their author 
fund data, I've been able to calculate that over the past few years 
there is evidence that BMC is raising prices at rates far beyond 
inflation (and far beyond what could be accounted for through 
currency fluctuations).


Details are posted here:

http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2014/02/the-dramatic-growth-of-biomedcentral.html

Note that this data reflects BMC practices and cannot be generalized 
to open access publishing as a whole. Public Library of Science, for 
example, has achieved a 23% surplus in the same time frame without 
increasing their OA article processing charges at all.


best,

--
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa

Desmarais 111-02

613-562-5800 ext. 7634
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
heather.morri...@uottawa.ca 

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[GOAL] Re: Joint Statement on Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear Dana,

Unfortunately this is only partly true. The "epub ahead of print" 
practices vary a lot. Even though articles after acceptance could be 
copy-edited straight away and posted, editors and publishers don't want 
to have excessive lists of dozens of articles up there, especially if 
they haven't been assigned issues and page numbers yet. That would in 
itself be bad publicity. For instance  JASIST in which I have published 
several articles recently tends to put up eprints a couple of months 
before final publishing, which means they could have waited half a year 
from acceptance already.


A real horror story of a journal is Journal of Civil Engineering and 
Management (a Tailor and Frances journal, but essentially run by editors 
from a Lithuanian university). Together with a collegue we had an 
article accepted in March 2012 which still is waiting to be published. 
And they don't do epubs before print. While this is bad service their 
practice of publishing articles from Lituanian colleagues much faster 
than the rest (can be studied at the websiteI) is clearly unethical.


Bo-Christer



On 12/21/13 8:52 PM, Dana Roth wrote:


Re: "Publishing in scholarly peer reviewed journals usually entails 
long delays from submission to publication. In part this is due to the 
length of the peer review process and *in part because of the 
dominating tradition of publication in issues*, earlier a necessity of 
paper-based publishing, which creates backlogs of manuscripts waiting 
in line."  ... in: http://openaccesspublishing.org/oa11/article.pdf


  
Isn't is generally true (at least in the science and technology fields) that 'Epub ahead of print' publishing practices have obviated delays in waiting for issues to be completed?
  
I understand that in mathematics and other fields that delays between 'Epub ahead of print' and the final completed issue can stretch out for ~a year.
  


Dana L. Roth
Caltech Library  1-32
1200 E. California Blvd. Pasadena, CA 91125
626-395-6423  fax 626-792-7540
dzr...@library.caltech.edu <mailto:dzr...@library.caltech.edu>
http://library.caltech.edu/collections/chemistry.htm

*From:*goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *On 
Behalf Of *Bo-Christer Björk

*Sent:* Saturday, December 21, 2013 9:27 AM
*To:* goal@eprints.org
*Subject:* [GOAL] Re: Joint Statement on Principles of Transparency 
and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing


You could check out
http://openaccesspublishing.org/oa11/article.pdf

as well as

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157713000710

green version

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~sugimoto/preprints/Journalacceptancerates.pdf 
<http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/%7Esugimoto/preprints/Journalacceptancerates.pdf>


Bo-Christer

On 12/21/13 5:43 PM, Gerritsma, Wouter wrote:

Dear all,

With regards to this really excellent initiative I am looking in
to the various degrees in transparency of the peer review process.
Has anybody examples at hand of editorials, where they give an
overview of number of articles submitted, and ultimately accepted,
and the time the whole cycle from submission to final publication
actually took. So now and then I have seen this in journals, but
can't find any example right now.

I would be grateful for some hints.

Wouter

Wouter Gerritsma

Team leader research support

Information Specialist -- Bibliometrician

Wageningen UR Library

PO box 9100

6700 HA Wageningen

The Netherlands

++31 3174 83052

wouter.gerrit...@wur.nl <mailto:wouter.gerrit...@wur.nl%0d>

wageningenur.nl/library <http://wageningenur.nl/library>

@wowter <http://twitter.com/Wowter/>

wowter.net <http://wowter.net/>

#AWCP http://tinyurl.com/mk65m36

*From:* goal-boun...@eprints.org <mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org>
[mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *On Behalf Of *Claire Redhead
*Sent:* donderdag 19 december 2013 16:41
*To:* goal@eprints.org <mailto:goal@eprints.org>
*Subject:* [GOAL] Joint Statement on Principles of Transparency
and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing

The Committee on Publication Ethics
<http://publicationethics.org/%E2%80%8E>, the Directory of Open
Access Journals <http://www.doaj.org/>, the Open Access Scholarly
Publishers Association <http://oaspa.org/>, and the World
Association of Medical Editors <http://www.wame.org/> are
scholarly organizations that have seen an increase in the number
of membership applications from both legitimate and non-legitimate
publishers and journals. Our organizations have collaborated in an
effort to identify principles of transparency and best practice
that set apart legitimate journals and publishers from
non-legitimate ones and to clarify that these principles form part
o

[GOAL] Re: Joint Statement on Principles of Transparency and Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing

[Bo-Christer Björk]

You could check out
http://openaccesspublishing.org/oa11/article.pdf

as well as

http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1751157713000710

green version

http://ella.slis.indiana.edu/~sugimoto/preprints/Journalacceptancerates.pdf

Bo-Christer

On 12/21/13 5:43 PM, Gerritsma, Wouter wrote:


Dear all,

With regards to this really excellent initiative I am looking in to 
the various degrees in transparency of the peer review process. Has 
anybody examples at hand of editorials, where they give an overview of 
number of articles submitted, and ultimately accepted, and the time 
the whole cycle from submission to final publication actually took. So 
now and then I have seen this in journals, but can't find any example 
right now.


I would be grateful for some hints.

Wouter

Wouter Gerritsma

Team leader research support

Information Specialist -- Bibliometrician

Wageningen UR Library

PO box 9100

6700 HA Wageningen

The Netherlands

++31 3174 83052

wouter.gerrit...@wur.nl __

wageningenur.nl/library 

@wowter 

wowter.net 

#AWCPhttp://tinyurl.com/mk65m36

*From:*goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *On 
Behalf Of *Claire Redhead

*Sent:* donderdag 19 december 2013 16:41
*To:* goal@eprints.org
*Subject:* [GOAL] Joint Statement on Principles of Transparency and 
Best Practice in Scholarly Publishing


The Committee on Publication Ethics 
, the Directory of Open Access 
Journals , the Open Access Scholarly Publishers 
Association , and the World Association of Medical 
Editors are scholarly organizations that have 
seen an increase in the number of membership applications from both 
legitimate and non-legitimate publishers and journals. Our 
organizations have collaborated in an effort to identify principles of 
transparency and best practice that set apart legitimate journals and 
publishers from non-legitimate ones and to clarify that these 
principles form part of the criteria on which membership applications 
will be evaluated.


This is a work in progress and we welcome feedback on the general 
principles and the specific criteria. Please see the full statement 
 
on the OASPA blog (http://oaspa.org/blog/).



Claire Redhead
Membership & Communications Manager
Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association, OASPA
http://oaspa.org/



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[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Study Commissioned by UK BIS

[Bo-Christer Björk]

I fully agree with Stevan on the need to define a clear standard for 
what we measure and when, by I have a different view of some details.


Why not simply talk of "Immediate Open Access" and "Delayed Open 
Access", both provide open access. I'm also getting more and more 
hesitant about the use of the terms Gold and green since there is so 
much confusion in actual usage. The term subsidized open access is kind 
of misleading. The only subsidy a lot of OA journals, in particular in 
the social science and humanities, and journals published elsewhere than 
in the US, UK, are getting is the usage of a university web site, the 
marginal cost of which is almost nil. Or in Latin America etc. the use 
of Scielo, which is very low cost per journal and hence only a small 
part of their resource use. Other than that its mainly voluntary work by 
academic communities. Remember that the universities of editors, 
reveiewers, etc already "subsidize" society and commercial publisher 
journals.


The open archives term (for delayed open access) that Elsevier invented 
is downright silly. Most people who think of this as getting e-access to 
articles published many years and decades ago.


I agree with Stevan that perhaps their could be a three month delay 
border for the definition of immediate Open Access, to allow for a 
slight delay for authors putting up manuscripts of non-embargoed journal 
articles. As for delayed OA I would suggest going for just one minumum 
period in broad studies and I would put it at slightly over a year, 
perhaps 15 months. This has to do with the increasingly common 12 month 
embargo periods, and again the fact that many authors following such 
embargoes may post a couple of months later. Also it is very common for 
academics to post articles to IRs for their full last year production in 
January, February the next year when they have to report meta data to 
their universities for book-keeping, which means that for some article 
the delay will be slightly over a year.


If a study in particular wan't to study how green OA increases as a 
function of the delay (6, 12, 24 ect) that is naturally fine, but in 
most reporting in the popular press (including journal like Nature) they 
simplify the message to single figures.


In practice it is difficult in mass studies based on sampling of say 
Scopus meta data to determine the exact delays for each article (which 
would also entail also finding out when the copy was posted). All you 
can do is run the googling at one point in time (or a relatively short 
period). In order to have a big enough delay it is often convenient to 
use the scopus or ISI data of articles published in the year before the 
last one.


One last item which somehow would need to be sorted out (and which was 
raised in connection with the recent Science-Metrix study) is that 
automated searches also catch what I would label "promotional OA", for 
instance the practice of many publishers to have the first issue of the 
last year open using a rolling scheme (that is if you google a year 
later the articles are no longer available). Dependent on the time lag 
of the study, but in particular for delays between a few months and say 
a year and a half, counting such articles in could raise the overall OA 
prevalence with as much as five percent. Also due to the fact that in 
such studies googled hits are sometimes classified as gold OA, based on 
the journals in question being in DOAJ, such hits will then 
misleadingly  be classified as green OA.


Bo-Christer

On 12/7/13 2:01 AM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
On Fri, Dec 6, 2013 at 2:00 PM, Bo-Christer Björk 
mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi>> wrote:



The Elsevier study on OA prevalence study was part of broader
report. The methods are just shortly mentioned so its a bit
problematic to comment in detail.
The global gold OA share found is 9,7 % of scopus articles,
consisting of 5,5 % APC paid and 4,2 others (not just 5.5 % as
Stevan noted below). The global hybrid share is 0.5. The green
global share could be assumed to more or less be the sum of
preprint versions of 6.4 % and accepted versions 5.0 %, adding
directly to around 11 %. In particular if their method only took
the first found full text copy and then classified it

The big flaw of the study seems to be in the sample used, since it
consisted of equal numbers of Scopus articles that had been
published 2 months, 6 months, 12 months and 24 months before the
Googling. If the hits are simple added up for all the sampled
articles this means that a major share of selfarchivied
manuscripts are ignored, due to embargoes or author behavior in
for instance selfarchiving once a year. For instance half of the
copies in PMC would not be found in this way. Equally the very low
figure for "Open Archives", 1.0 %, could be a result of this
method.

[GOAL] Re: Elsevier Study Commissioned by UK BIS

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Hi all

The Elsevier study on OA prevalence study was part of broader report. 
The methods are just shortly mentioned so its a bit problematic to 
comment in detail.
The global gold OA share found is 9,7 % of scopus articles, consisting 
of 5,5 % APC paid and 4,2 others (not just 5.5 % as Stevan noted below). 
The global hybrid share is 0.5. The green global share could be assumed 
to more or less be the sum of preprint versions of 6.4 % and accepted 
versions 5.0 %, adding directly to around 11 %. In particular if their 
method only took the first found full text copy and then classified it


The big flaw of the study seems to be in the sample used, since it 
consisted of equal numbers of Scopus articles that had been published 2 
months, 6 months, 12 months and 24 months before the Googling. If the 
hits are simple added up for all the sampled articles this means that a 
major share of selfarchivied manuscripts are ignored, due to embargoes 
or author behavior in for instance selfarchiving once a year. For 
instance half of the copies in PMC would not be found in this way. 
Equally the very low figure for "Open Archives", 1.0 %, could be a 
result of this method. Our own results for delayed OA are around 5 %.


So all in all the figures are much lower than if one includes articles 
made OA with at least a one year delay, which we find is the method we 
would recommend for studies claiming to give overall OA uptake figures. 
Whether this methodological choice was a conscious one from the study 
team or just an oversight is difficult to know. But if they would have 
adhered to a strict interpretation that only immediate OA is OA, the 
sampling should have been different. Now it's somewhere in between.


Best regards

Bo-Christer





 and On 12/6/13 5:31 PM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
Elsevier has just conducted and published a study commissioned by UK 
BIS: "International Comparative Performance of the UK Research Base -- 
2013 
"


This study finds twice as much Green OA (11.6%) as Gold OA (5.9%) in 
the UK (where bothGreen OA repositories 
 and Green 
OA mandates 
 began) and about 
equal levels of Green (5.0%) and Gold (5.5%) in the rest of the world.


There are methodological weaknesses in the Elsevier study, which was 
based on SCOPUS data (Gold data are direct and based on the whole data 
set, Green data are partial and based on hand-sampling; timing is not 
taken into account; categories of OA are often arbitrary and not 
mutually exclusive, etc). But the overall pattern may have some validity.


What does it mean?

It means the effects of Green OA mandates in the UK 
 -- 
where there are relatively more of them, and they have been there for 
a half decade or more -- are detectable, compared to the rest of the 
world , where mandates are 
relatively fewer.


But 11.6% Green is just a pale, partial indicator of how much OA Green 
OA mandates generate: If instead of looking at the world (where about 
1% of institutions and funders have OA mandates) or the UK (where the 
percentage is somewhat higher, but many of the mandates are still weak 
and ineffective ones), one looks specifically at the OA percentages 
for effectively mandated institutions 
, the Green figure jumps to over 
80% (about half of it immediate-OA and half embargoed OA: deposited, 
and accessible during the embargo via the repository's automated 
copy-request Button, with a click from the requestor and a click from 
the author).


So if the planet's current level of Green OA is 11.6%, its level will 
jump to at least 80% as effective Green OA mandates are adopted.


Meanwhile, Gold OA will continue to be unnecessary, over-priced, 
double-paid (which journal subscriptions still need to be paid) and 
potentially even double-dipped (if paid to the same hybrid 
subscription/Gold publisher) out of scarce research funds contributed 
by UK tax-payers ("Fool's Gold 
").


But once Green OA prevails worldwide, Fair Gold 
 (and 
all the Libre OA re-use rights that users need and authors want to 
provide) will not be far behind.


We are currently gathering data to test whether the immediate-deposit 
 (HEFCE 

[GOAL] New study of green embargoes

[Bo-Christer Björk]

A manuscript version of the article
Laakso, M 2014, 'Green open access policies of scholarly journal 
publishers: a study of what, when, and where self-archiving is allowed', 
which has just been accepted for publishing in Scientometrics, has just 
been posted to the HANKEN IR. See
http://hanken.halvi.helsinki.fi/portal/files/2323707/Lakso_2014_Green_OA_Policies_Accepted_Version_.pdf

Bo-Christer Björk

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[GOAL] Re: Where now for OA in the UK?

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear Stevan,

Just a couple of points. I'm on the side of OA, period. Gold and green 
are just means for achieving it. I also think that even access with a 
delay is better than no access, that access to the version of record is 
better than access to an author copy, and that libre access is better 
than gratis. Anyway the "market"  will decide, but its of course 
important that stakeholders have good information about the status quo 
and developments. That's what my group has been trying to do recently.


The big publishers will try to cash in, either via the hybrid route 
(there are now already some 8,000 hybrid journals, doubled in a couple 
of years), new APC full OA journals emerging weekly, or if the green 
route via mandates starts to grow rapidly, by bundling conditions and 
compensating income (for foreseeable reductions in income from lowering 
numbers of toll gated articles)  with their subscription big deals with 
the universities in question.


Concerning mandates the important metric is the number of articles that 
existing mandates cover, and here the gross number of mandates and its 
growth is less important. Small Finland, for instance, is number 5 
globally on the Roarmap list with 28 mandates, but 26 of these are from 
small regional polytechniques with extremely little output of peer 
reviewed journal articles. Also the exact formulation of mandates and 
the sticks and carrots in use matters a lot.


Bo-Christer


On 11/29/13 1:17 AM, Stevan Harnad wrote:
On Thu, Nov 28, 2013 at 3:51 PM, Bo-Christer Björk 
mailto:bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi>> wrote:


The idea that publishers would tolerate large scale mandate driven
green OA (say 50-60 %) of articles with no embargoes or
counteractions is pretty naive. Elsevier has shown the way with
rules stipulating that Green OA is OK, unless its mandated, in
which case they require special deals with the the institutions in
question. And many publishers who previously had no embargo
periods are starting to define such.


Bo-Christer, unfortunately you have completely missed the point.

/Yes, publishers can and will try to impose embargoes on Green OA, 
especially encouraged by the perverse effete of the UK's Finch/RCUK 
preference and subsidy for Gold./ That was not being denied, it was 
being affirmed: "Joint 'Re-Engineering' Plan of UK Government and UK 
Publisher Lobby for 'Nudging' UK Researchers Toward Gold Open Access 
<http://openaccess.eprints.org/index.php?/archives/1077-Critique-of-UK-Governments-Response-to-BIS-Recommendations-on-UK-Open-Access-Policy.html>"


But the immediate-deposit 
<https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=%22immediate+deposit%22+blogurl:http%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbm=blg> 
(HEFCE 
<https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=hefce+immediate+blogurl:http%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbm=blg>/Liege 
<https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=liege+model++blogurl:http%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbm=blg>) 
mandates are immune to these publisher embargoes. They are the 
compromise mandate that fits all funders and institutions, regardless 
of how long a maximal publisher embargo they allow. (Green OA after 
one a one-year embargo has been pretty much conceded by all 
publishers, whether or not they admit it, so that's the worst case 
scenario: that's the target to beat). The HEFCE/Liege mandates get 
everything deposited in institutional repositories immediately, 
whether or not it is made OA immediately. And that means that access 
to everything immediately becomes at most 2 keystrokes away, one from 
the requestor, one from the author, thanks to the repositories' 
automated "Almost-OA" Button 
<https://www.google.ca/search?hl=en&lr=&q=harnad%20OR%20Harnad%20OR%20archivangelism+blogurl:http://openaccess.eprints.org/&ie=UTF-8&tbm=blg&tbs=qdr:m&num=100&c2coff=1&safe=active#c2coff=1&hl=en&lr=&q=button+blogurl:http%3A%2F%2Fopenaccess.eprints.org%2F&safe=active&tbm=blg>: 
see below.)


As to Elsevier's "special deals" for mandating institutions: sensible 
institutions will politely inform Elsevier that they are prepared to 
negotiate wit

[GOAL] Re: Where now for OA in the UK?

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear Chris,

I fully agree. The idea that publishers would tolerate large scale 
mandate driven green OA (say 50-60 %) of articles with no embargoes or 
counteractions is pretty naive. Elsevier has shown the way with rules 
stipulating that Green OA is OK, unless its mandated, in which case they 
require special deals with the the institutions in question. And many 
publishers who previously had no embargo periods are starting to define 
such.


Bo-Christer Björk


 11/28/13 10:18 AM, Armbruster, Chris wrote:
Fool's Gold, extra money, sustainable price - the arguments against 
OAP don't add up. A more plausible hypothesis is that Green OA is more 
costly and less efficient.


Consider the following:
- Research outputs in the form of publications continue growing
- Subscription prices keep increasing, and a key argument is the rise 
in output
- The costs of SB publishing are estimated to be 3-4k a piece, and for 
OA publishing about 2k a piece
- New OA publishing entrants often charge less, e.g. PLoS One, 
Hindawi, PEERJ
- It is often pointed out that much OA publishing is free to authors, 
e.g. OJS ventures
- OA publishing offers cost-control in various forms, e.g. SCOAP3, 
institutional subsidies


If OA publishing is cheaper than SB publishing, every OA publication 
reduces cost. Moreover, if most of the above assumptions hold, then a 
transition road can be described easily.


By contrast, Green OA means pushing more and more output into the SB 
publishing model, leading to yet more price increases while asking the 
research institutions and the taxpayer to fund an extra infrastructure 
for authors' manuscripts that has hidden costs (e.g. chasing deposits, 
all the political coordination) as well as opportunity costs (e.g. IPR 
regime maintained, re-use very limited).


Chris


Am 27.11.2013 um 19:45 schrieb Stevan Harnad <mailto:har...@ecs.soton.ac.uk>>:


On 2013-11-27, at 12:47 PM, "Armbruster, Chris" 
mailto:chris.armbrus...@eui.eu>> wrote:


What puzzles me is that quite a number of OA veterans and advocates 
keep moaning about the UK OA policy. In your case, Fred, I am 
intrigued by the assertion that
"The Finch saga has done nothing to change the IPR regime through 
which publishers control the infrastructure, nor is the 
process leading to true competition whereby there would be a choice 
for users between two suppliers of the same research paper."
CC-BY changes the IPR Regime and leads to an open infrastructure, 
also enabling institutions hold the VoR in their repositories. Also, 
APCs vary widely; new and innovative OA models keep emerging; and 
APCs enable a comparison of quality and price: helping researchers 
when choosing the venue of publication.


More generally: Can anybody point to a policy other than the UK one 
that comes closer to realizing BBB?
And no, the Liege ID/OA mandate does not come closer. Authors' 
manuscripts are not the VoR, submitted within the old IPR 
infrastructure, subject to an embargo and so on.


Simple answer:

/CC-BY is not worth all that extra UK money, over and above /
/uncancellable subscriptions./

Nor are the perverse effects of the UK Gold mandate on
Green embargoes worldwide.

Global Green (free online access) needs to come first.

That (and not throwing more money at Fool's Gold) will
bring Fair Gold and CC-BY, at an affordable, sustainable price.

But as long as Finch Folly and the push for pre-emptive
Fool's Gold persist, that outcome is embargoed.

Fortunately, the HEFCE/Liege immediate-deposit model
plus the automated request-a-copy-Button will work almost
as well, despite Finch's Fool's Gold preference.

If I sound weary of this folly, then I have successfully
conveyed my sentiments...

;>)

Stevan


Am 27.11.2013 um 17:20 schrieb Friend, Fred <mailto:f.fri...@ucl.ac.uk>>:


Three recent official documents have presented marginally different 
views of the future of OA in the UK: the Review of the 2012 Finch 
Report, the Government Response to the criticisms from Parliament's 
BIS Committee, and the RCUK's Response to the same Committee. 
Although all three documents (links below) maintain the previous 
position that the future model for OA in the UK will be APC-paid 
"gold", there are now subtle but potentially significant 
differences between the new policy statements.


It is now clear that the UK Government has listened to criticisms 
of its policy and is no longer willing to support the Finch Group 
recommendations in the unthinking way it did in July 2012. One 
example of this modified approach comes in the warm way the 
Government now writes of the value of OA repositories and their 
long-term role. Both the recent Finch Group Review and the UK 
Government Response point to the reality of a "mixed economy" of 
green and gold OA. While the Finch Group have also been listening 
to criticism of their side-lining of repositor

[GOAL] Re: Disruption vs. Protection

[Bo-Christer Björk]

I fully agree,

There would be no great harm done in the longer perspective if some of 
the current major publishers dissapeared from the market, as long as the 
access to older article in their electronic holdings are secured. They 
would just be replaced by other. Academics need good journals for many 
reasons, partly because of recognition and evaluation reasons. Good and 
top journals have usually not been created through design but through a 
Darwinian selection process where authors, reviewers and academic 
editors flock to journals which become the leading ones in their fields, 
and these journals in many fields are not always more expensive to 
operate, since the major cost difference to lower prestige journals is 
in the amount of unpaid voluntary work going into the peer review part. 
And this is large managed by academic editors as well.  I see no danger 
to the quality of scientific article publishing. People are still able 
to fly around the world even if many major airlines who haven't been 
able to adapt to changing market  conditions have gone bankrupt.

Best regards
Bo-Christer


  9/16/13 12:42 AM, Andrew A. Adams wrote:
> Journal cancellation rates are currently almost impossible to judge, at least
> for the big publishers because of the "big deals". The big deal subscriptions
> mean that many libraries are subscribing either to whole publisher
> archives/fleets or at least to whole subjects. In those circumstances
> institutions cannot unsubscribe from individual journals until and unless
> sufficient journals could be included to drop the price of the remaining
> necessary journal subscriptions to below the big deal cost.
>
> All the cancellation (because of Green OA) talk is entirely speculative and
> pretty much impossible to model (because so many other things are also
> changing at the same time) that we must focus on cutting through the Gordian
> knot of "transitions to sustainable publishing" by mandating Green OA
> (Immediate Deposit/Optional Access where necessary) and let the disruptions
> to publishing take its course as it may.
>
> Some argue that publishing and journals are so important to academia that we
> must be careful not to undermine them. I make the opposite evaluation:
> journals and peer review are so important to academia that if Green OA (so
> far as we can tell from some pretty decent evidence quickly achievable by
> Mandates [and only by mandates]) causes significant disruption to journal
> publishing viability, that the relevant communities would quickly find a way
> to ensure the survival of the important avenues of communications by means
> other than the current subscription model.
>
>

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[GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

[Bo-Christer Björk]

We did a scientific empirical study of APCs of journals listed in DOAJ 
as Open Access peer reviewed journals. We did not attempt to out screen 
journals not fulfilling certain quality norms. If somebody wishes to 
replicate the study and exclude certain publishers, that's obviously 
doable. Another way would be for DOAJ to start excluding journals but 
that could become very complicated and resource demanding.

Best Bo-Christer


On 12/13/12 1:36 PM, Richard Poynder wrote:
> Point taken, but was there a particular reason for including the "Beall"
> journals in your study? What purpose did it serve?
>
> The criticism of some of these journals, by the way, goes some way beyond
> the fact that they are guilty of spamming researchers.
>
> Richard Poynder
>
>
> -Original Message-
> From: bj...@hanken.fi [mailto:bj...@hanken.fi]
> Sent: 13 December 2012 11:24
> To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci); Richard Poynder
> Cc: 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)'
> Subject: Re: [GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber
>
> In our study with David Solomon we weighted the APCs of different journals
> with the number of articles they had published to arrive at the average APC
> of around 900 USD. For instance the impact of PloS One alone is bigger than
> all the 200+ journals of Bentham together. So although we didn't calculate
> any share for "Beall" journals their overall impact is not that big. More
> disturbing is the bad press they create by spamming.
>
> Bo-Christer
>
>
>
> Quoting Richard Poynder :
>
>> Hi Ross,
>>
>>
>>
>> Absolutely, I see no problem at all with a publisher being based in the
>> developing world and, as you point out, Hindawi is a good example of a
>> respected publisher based in a developing country.
>>
>>
>>
>> But that does not mean that one should avoid any criticism of publishers
>> because they are based in a certain geographical location.
>>
>>
>>
>> What I am saying is that if you put together the fact that the study
>> included quite a few publishers on Jeffrey Beall's list with the fact that
>> these publishers seem invariably to be based in the developing world (even
>> though some claim to be based in the US) then you might wonder whether the
>> average APC figure arrived at in the study could have been subject to some
>> bias.
>>
>>
>>
>> My point is less about the developing world than it is about predatory
>> publishers, and whether they ought to be included in a study aimed at
>> establishing the average cost of publishing in an OA journal.
>>
>>
>>
>> I do understand that Beall's list is a controversial one, but I have
> looked
>> at a number of these publishers myself and I have reached my own
>> conclusions.
>>
>>
>>
>> Richard
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> From: goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] On Behalf
>> Of Ross Mounce
>> Sent: 13 December 2012 09:59
>> To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
>> Subject: [GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber
>>
>>
>>
>> On 13 December 2012 09:32, Richard Poynder >  > wrote:
>>
>> I believe this latter study included a number of publishers based in the
>> developing world
>>
>>
>>
>> Hi Richard,
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>> I hope you see nothing wrong in a number of publishers being based in the
>> 'developing world' ?
>>
>> Hindawi are perhaps one such publisher, if one classes Egypt as a
>> 'developing world' country. You've even written yourself that there tends
> to
>> be perhaps an unjust bias against 'developing world' publishers
>>
> http://poynder.blogspot.co.uk/2012/09/the-oa-interviews-ahmed-hindawi-founde
>> r.html
>>
>>
>>
>> Can you please make clear what you mean by what you said?
>>
>> I don't want to encourage assessments of quality purely based upon
>> geographic location.
>>
>>
>>
>> Best,
>>
>>
>>
>> Ross
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>>
>
>
>

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[GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

[Bo-Christer Björk]

David,

The share of APC-charging OA articles was 49 % in 2011 and is growing. 
For more detailed empirical evidence check out our recent article


Bo-Christer Björk, Mikael Laakso
Anatomy of open access publishing: a study of longitudinal development 
and internal structure

http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124

Also as a comment to the discussion on APC levels, I suspect that the 
publisher lobby has been trying to give an impression of a higher 
average APC level than supported by empirical evidence. To me it seems 
pretty clear that researchers getting funding from Wellcome trust are 
among the top stratum of researchers in biomedicine, where APCs on the 
whole are higher and also tend to publish more in the top OA journals 
which charge at the higher end of the scale. Hence an average of 
Wellcome Trust payments is not illustrative.


Best regards

Bo-Christer





On 12/13/12 10:01 AM, David Prosser wrote:
I must admit that intuitively (and with no real evidence!) I wonder 
about the 50% figure for the proportion of Gold OA articles for which 
no APC payment has been made.  The reason being that the biggest OA 
journals and publishers - PLoS One, BMC, Hindawi - all charge APCs and 
so although the proportion of journals may be 50%, I would guess that 
the proportion of articles is significantly less.


But these large publishers are mainly in the life and medical sciences 
and if one looks at other disciplines the ratio may be closer to 50%. 
 The reason I think this is an important distinction to make is that 
we often hear objections from arts and humanities scholars that they 
cannot support Gold OA as they do not have the funds to pay for APC. 
 But in their fields (and others) there are many, many Gold OA 
journals that make no publication charges.  This is where the 'Gold OA 
journals charge APCs' shorthand becomes rather unhelpful.


I must admit I am completely bemused by Alicia's comments.  She 
suggests that Elsevier has pioneered a number of business models that 
are now being clammed by the OA community as being Gold OA.  To help 
could she give, say, three concrete examples?


Best wishes

David




On 12 Dec 2012, at 23:15, Hans Pfeiffenberger wrote:


Hi Alicia,

an hour before your mail, I suggested a blog article which seems to 
say that about 50% of all gold OA journals do not ask for APCs at all 
and APCs were indeed not paid for by half of all Gold OA articles.


This is not reconcilable with the 3-4% you report. Are we perhaps 
talking about completely different ratios?


best,

Hans

for your convenience: the link, again, was: 
http://svpow.com/2012/12/10/what-does-it-cost-to-publish-a-gold-open-access-article/



Am 12.12.12 13:59, schrieb Wise, Alicia (ELS-OXF):


Hi Richard,

My colleague does an in-depth annual study on the uptake of 
different business models, and suggests that this figure was 3-4% of 
total articles at the start of 2012. Elsevier, and I'm sure a wide 
array of other publishers, have used a range of business models to 
produce free-to-read journals for decades. I find it very 
interesting that these models are now claimed by the open access 
community as 'gold oa' titles although I suppose that's much less of 
a mouthful than 'free-at-the-point-of-use' titles!


With kind wishes,

Alicia

*From:*goal-boun...@eprints.org [mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] 
*On Behalf Of *Richard Poynder

*Sent:* Wednesday, December 12, 2012 8:42 AM
*To:* 'Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)'
*Subject:* [GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

Thanks for the comments David. Your point about not equating Gold OA 
with APCs is well taken.


But it also invites a question I think: do we know what percentage 
of papers(not journals, but papers) published Gold OA today incur no 
APC charge, and what do we anticipate this percentage becoming in a 
post-Finch world?


Richard

//

*From:*goal-boun...@eprints.org <mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org> 
[mailto:goal-boun...@eprints.org] *On Behalf Of *David Prosser

*Sent:* 11 December 2012 19:53
*To:* Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)
*Subject:* [GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

As ever, Richard has put together a fascinating and entertaining 
interview, and augmented it with a really useful essay on the 
current state of OA policies.


I have a small quibble.  On page two, Richard writes:

"...or by means of gold OA, in which researchers (or more usually 
their funders) pay publishers an article-processing charge (APC) to 
ensure that their paper is made freely available on the Web at the 
time of publication."


APCs make up just one business model that can be used to support 
Gold OA.  Gold is OA through journals - it makes no assumption about 
how the costs of publication are paid for.  I think it is helpful to 
ensure that we do not equate Gold with APCs.


David

On 3 Dec 2012, at 18:51, Richa

[GOAL] Re: Puzzled - please help

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear Sally,

This has obviously puzzled us as well Yassine and Stevan.

The discrepancies in the green figures are easier to deal with. Since 
Yassine's gold figures are so low and everything else which the robots 
have found is classified as "self-archieved" the hits classified as 
green rise over 20 %. However, in our studies we have further split down 
such copies into further categories. It turns out that part are not 
self-archieved at all but articles in delayed OA journals (the robot 
searches are made with a considerable delay due to the availability of 
meta-data), paid hybrid articles and promotionally free articles in 
subscription journals (many journals seem to make one issue per annum 
free as advertisement). All of these are caught in the same robotized 
net and should be sorted out. In 2011 there were around 83'000 delayed 
OA articles, around 10'000 hybrid article and an unknown number of 
promotional OA articles in ISI journals which together make at least 7-8 %.


The huge discrepancy in the pure gold number is more difficult to 
explain, and the fact that Yassine's study had a more limited number of 
disciplines with equally big samples cannot alone explain it. Their 
numbers show hardly any growth in the gold share in ISI between 2005 and 
2010, when our as we believe very robust method shows a very substantial 
growth (from 6,6 % to 9 % share in ISI between just 2008 and 2011). Also 
their numbers are even lower than the Mc Veight study from 2003, a year 
when BMC and PLoS were just started.


Best regards

Bo-Christer







On 11/6/12 6:41 PM, Sally Morris wrote:

Can anyone shed light on the following apparent discrepancy:
Laakso and Bjork (http://www.biomedcentral.com/1741-7015/10/124) give 
a figure for articles published in 2011 and indexed in Scopus - 11% in 
full Gold journals, 0.7% in hybrid journals, and 5% in 'delayed OA' 
journals with a delay of no more than 12 months [Stevan may not like 
the term, but I think the rest of us understand it well enough, so 
let's not get into that!]
Gargouri et al (http://arxiv.org/ftp/arxiv/papers/1206/1206.3664.pdf), 
on the other hand, give a figure of just 1.2% articles published in 
2010 via Gold OA
Furthermore, Gargouri et al give the percentage of 2010 articles 
available via Green OA as 21.9% (2008 articles 20.6%).  Bjork et al 
(http://www.plosone.org/article/info:doi/10.1371/journal.pone.0011273) 
had a very different figure of 11.9% for articles published in 2008.
I can't get my head round the spectacular difference between the two 
sets of figures - can someone please explain?  I can't believe that 
inclusion/exclusion in Scopus can possibly account for it. Am I 
missing something?

Thanks
Sally
Sally Morris
South House, The Street, Clapham, Worthing, West Sussex, UK BN13 3UU
Tel:  +44 (0)1903 871286
Email:  sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk


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[GOAL] Re: Gold OA: Publication costs and journal impact factors

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear all

You may find the green copies of some recent articles by myself and 
David Solomon at

http://openaccesspublishing.org/

of interest

Our studies provides some empirical data concerning some of the issues 
discussed during the recent discussion on this list

Bo-Christer Björk

On 10/12/12 5:11 PM, ANDREW Theo wrote:
> Dear All,
>
> I'd like to draw your attention to a piece of work we have carried out which 
> looks at Gold OA fees and journal impact factors:
>
> http://libraryblogs.is.ed.ac.uk/openscholarship/2012/10/02/impact-cost/
>
> In short, it appears that 1) hybrid journals generally charge more than full 
> OA journals independent of journal impact factor, and 2) hybrid journals with 
> high impact factors charge significantly more than other types of journal for 
> gold open access.
>
> I find this apparent correlation between journal impact factor and cost 
> worrying and would welcome feedback. Is this something that other people are 
> seeing or have we got our facts wrong?
>
> Kind regards, Theo
> __
> Theo Andrew
> Research Publications Service
> Edinburgh University Library
>
> tel.  0131 651 3850
> web.   http://bit.ly/UoE-RPS
> post.   4 Buccleuch Place,
>   Edinburgh, EH8 9LW.
> skype. theoandrew
>
>


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[GOAL] Re: A special issue on Open Access in Latin America

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear Heather and list followers,

The inclusion in Web of Knowledge does not in itself help dissemination 
much. The key question to my mind if this means that all Scielo journals 
after a couple of years will get impact factors. If that is the case the 
number of OA journals in JCR will double. And being indexed in this way 
will help the journals in attracting better manuscripts.

I'm speculating, but it seems to me that this is a very cost-effective 
way for Thomson-Reuters to get "regional" journals.

Bo-Christer Björk





On 10/7/12 2:31 AM, Heather Morrison wrote:
> Very interesting, thanks for sharing this, Bo-Christer!
>
> Two questions:
>
> 1. Does, or will, Thomson Reuters offer free searching for open access 
> content?
>
> 2. Will authors and institutions contributing to Scielo and/or Redalyc get 
> free access to Web of Knowledge? If this is not the case, this may illustrate 
> a fairly major deviation from the original BOAI vision of "sharing of the 
> rich with the poor and the poor with the rich" to just "sharing of the poor 
> with the rich".
>
> It is good to see Latin American authors get more visibility and impact, 
> however unless reciprocity is built in, I would argue that this kind of 
> development is more problematic than helpful, and ultimately may result in 
> erosion of support for these leading open access initiatives.
>
> best,
>
> Heather Morrison
>
> - Original Message -
> From: Bo-Christer Björk 
> To: Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci) 
> Sent: Sat, 06 Oct 2012 11:27:25 -0700 (PDT)
> Subject: [GOAL] Re: A special issue on Open Access in Latin America
>
> The following news item should be of interest. It also demonstrates the
> importance of national and regional portals like Scielo, Redalcy and
> others for promoting access.
> "Thomson Reuters Spotlights Emerging Research Centers with the Addition
> of SciELO Database to Web of Knowledge"
>
> http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/25/idUS160209+25-Jul-2012+HUG20120725
>
> Bo-Christer Björk
>
> On 10/6/12 8:42 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
>> I would like to point out a recent issue of Educación Superior y
>> Sociedad that was put together by one of the finest observers of Latin
>> American science policy, Dra. Hebe Vessuri, that deals with Open Access.
>>
>> http://ess.iesalc.unesco.org.ve/index.php/ess
>>
>> The issue includes articles by members of the OJS team, among others.
>> it also gives an interesting glimpses into the level of discussions on
>> OA as it evolves in latin America.
>>
>> One article is in English and Spanish. The rest is only in Spanish.
>>
>> The Latin American scene is interesting in that it foregrounds an
>> issue that has not been discussed often in OA circles: while OA helps
>> promote the visibility of researchers (the "OA advantage") as studied
>> in the case of repositories), it can also help promote research that
>> has been placed in a peripheral and invisible position by the present
>> two-tier system of science communication (inside or outside the web of
>> science and Scopus, for example).
>>
>> Quality of research is related only partially to inclusion in these
>> bibliographic tools and citation trackers, despite some claims to the
>> contrary. There is quality, a lot of it, outside these citation
>> trackers. Much research of quality is thus forgotten or neglected. It
>> is lost science.
>>
>> Promoting research from regions such as Latin America, but also
>> Africa, Asia, etc., is another benefit of open access, but it must be
>> designed in a different and complementary way: research in these
>> regions should be made sufficiently visible and prestigious as to
>> prevent it from being safely ignored by labs and researchers in
>> countries that produce most of the research in the world. Repositories
>> help insofar as visibility is concerned, but they are not sufficient
>> because peripheral research, so to speak, lacks branding (not quality,
>> but rather branding). Journals can provide this, and OA journals do it
>> best.
>>
>> This is not a statement against repositories; they too are needed,
>> very needed. But in peripheral (so-called) regions, the problem is
>> compounded by a lack of prestige and branding ability. OA journals try
>> to respond to this need. How best to achieve this is still a matter of
>> discussions and explorations, but SciELO and RedALyC are attempts
>> aiming straight at these problems.
>>
>> I cannot refrain concluding with a statement from an African novelist
>> who, while dealing with literatu

[GOAL] Re: A special issue on Open Access in Latin America

[Bo-Christer Björk]

The following news item should be of interest. It also demonstrates the 
importance of national and regional portals like Scielo, Redalcy and 
others for promoting access.
"Thomson Reuters Spotlights Emerging Research Centers with the Addition 
of SciELO Database to Web of Knowledge"


http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/07/25/idUS160209+25-Jul-2012+HUG20120725

Bo-Christer Björk

On 10/6/12 8:42 PM, Jean-Claude Guédon wrote:
I would like to point out a recent issue of Educación Superior y 
Sociedad that was put together by one of the finest observers of Latin 
American science policy, Dra. Hebe Vessuri, that deals with Open Access.


http://ess.iesalc.unesco.org.ve/index.php/ess

The issue includes articles by members of the OJS team, among others. 
it also gives an interesting glimpses into the level of discussions on 
OA as it evolves in latin America.


One article is in English and Spanish. The rest is only in Spanish.

The Latin American scene is interesting in that it foregrounds an 
issue that has not been discussed often in OA circles: while OA helps 
promote the visibility of researchers (the "OA advantage") as studied 
in the case of repositories), it can also help promote research that 
has been placed in a peripheral and invisible position by the present 
two-tier system of science communication (inside or outside the web of 
science and Scopus, for example).


Quality of research is related only partially to inclusion in these 
bibliographic tools and citation trackers, despite some claims to the 
contrary. There is quality, a lot of it, outside these citation 
trackers. Much research of quality is thus forgotten or neglected. It 
is lost science.


Promoting research from regions such as Latin America, but also 
Africa, Asia, etc., is another benefit of open access, but it must be 
designed in a different and complementary way: research in these 
regions should be made sufficiently visible and prestigious as to 
prevent it from being safely ignored by labs and researchers in 
countries that produce most of the research in the world. Repositories 
help insofar as visibility is concerned, but they are not sufficient 
because peripheral research, so to speak, lacks branding (not quality, 
but rather branding). Journals can provide this, and OA journals do it 
best.


This is not a statement against repositories; they too are needed, 
very needed. But in peripheral (so-called) regions, the problem is 
compounded by a lack of prestige and branding ability. OA journals try 
to respond to this need. How best to achieve this is still a matter of 
discussions and explorations, but SciELO and RedALyC are attempts 
aiming straight at these problems.


I cannot refrain concluding with a statement from an African novelist 
who, while dealing with literature, says things that can be easily 
transposed in the area of knowledge and science: "/As for now, caught 
between condescendance and generous curiosity, African literatures 
find it difficult to insert their mediocrity inside the others' 
mediocrity, and their magnificence inside the others' magnificence. 
They are condemned to living among each other."/ Sami Tchak, Désir 
d'Afrique (Paris, Gallimard, 2002), p. 312. Thanks to Alice Le Filleul 
who, unwittingly, attracted my attention to this splendid analysis. My 
own translation.


Good reading.

Jean-Claude Guédon

PS I have not read and checked every last article of this collection 
as I became aware of it recently, so that I cannot be sure that I 
agree with all the content. But I am sure the content is relevant to 
OA advocates and can help shape their strategic thinking in this 
particular arena.







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[GOAL] Re: Publications managed by scholarly communities/institutions

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Hi,

The Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) also welcomes 
individual journal members, but despite a very low yearly fee of 90 USD 
for such journals, rather few have joined. Journal of Information 
Technology in Construction is one example and I've been a board member 
for three years. In practice however the active members of the 
association are those charging APCs.

I don't see much point in forming a new association, but rather some 
form of co-operation with OASPA and with DOAJ could be useful.

DOAJ by the way includes information about wheather a journal charges an 
APC or not. The majority do not. Of this majority perhaps half are old 
usually society or university journals which have just made the 
e-version free. Still leaves some 2000 journals which could qualify as 
born OA community efforts. If any sort of list is compiled perhaps the 
best way would be by tagging those journals in DOAJ which fulfil the 
criteria

Bo-Christer Björk

PS all the four journals I mentioned before should qualify and there 
"story" can be found in editorials and a couple of case story articles.



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[GOAL] Re: Publications managed by scholarly communities/institutions

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Good idea,

Here are four such journals, all of which have been there since the 1990s:

Information Research

Journal of Information Technology in Construction

Journal of Electronic Publishing

First Monday

best regards

Bo-Christer Björk

Journal of On 8/9/12 11:35 AM, Laurent Romary wrote:

Dear all,
As an echo to the fourth option mentioned by Peter, I would like to 
gather references to journals and initiatives which are notoriously 
community based. Could members of the list point to what they would be 
aware of?

Thanks in advance,
Laurent

Le 7 août 2012 à 16:11, Peter Murray-Rust a écrit :




On Tue, Aug 7, 2012 at 11:27 AM, Sally Morris 
<mailto:sa...@morris-assocs.demon.co.uk>> wrote:


We should not delude ourselves; journals can only be 'free' if
someone pays
the costs.

All the work involved in creating and running a journal has to be
paid for
somehow - they don't magically go away if a journal is e-only (in
fact,
there are some new costs, even though some of the old ones
disappear).

I can only see three options for who pays:  reader-side (e.g. the
library);
author-side (e.g. publication fees);  or 'fairy godmother' (e.g.
sponsor).


There is a fourth option, which works: the scholarly community manage 
publication through contributed labour and resources and the net 
amount of cash is near-zero. This is described in 
http://blogs.law.harvard.edu/pamphlet/2012/03/06/an-efficient-journal/ where 
the J. Machine Learning Research is among the highest regarded 
journals in the area (top 7%) and free-to-authors and 
free-to-readers. There is an enlightening debate (on this URL) 
between those who run the journal and Kent Anderson of the Scholarly 
Kitchen who cannot believe that people will run and work for journals 
for the good of the community.


There is no law of physics that says this doesn't scale. It is simply 
that most scholars would rather the taxpayer and students paid for 
the administration publishing (either as author-side or reader-side) 
so the scholars don't have to do the work. And they've managed ot get 
10 B USD per year. If scholars regarded publishing as part of their 
role, of if they were prepared to involved the wider community (as 
Wikipedia has done) we could have a much more C21 type of activity - 
innovative and valuable to the whole world rather than just academia. 
It would cost zero, but it would be much cheaper than any current model.


And of course we now have a complete free map of the whole world 
(openstreetmap.org <http://openstreetmap.org/>) which is so much 
better than other alternatives that many people and organizations are 
switching to it. And, for many years, it didn't have a bank account 
and existed on "marginal resources" from UCL (and probably still does).


But most people will regard this as another fairy tale.



--
Peter Murray-Rust
Reader in Molecular Informatics
Unilever Centre, Dep. Of Chemistry
University of Cambridge
CB2 1EW, UK
+44-1223-763069
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Laurent Romary
INRIA & HUB-IDSL
laurent.rom...@inria.fr <mailto:laurent.rom...@inria.fr>





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[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishersthat should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear All,

I've been following this debate with interest from the sidelines for a 
few days. As some of you may have noticed our research has in the last 
couple of years been focused on providing empirical facts about OA. Here 
are a few very recent findings.

Hybrid OA is a failure, the main reason being the almost uniform 3000 
USD price level which can be contrasted with an average of around 900 
USD calculated over around 100,000 APC OA articles published in 2010. 
The uptake of hybrid was around 13,000 articles in 2011 over more than 
4,000 journals, meaning an uptake of 1-2% of eligible article and less 
than 1 % of the global article volume.

Gold OA published in DOAJ registered journals has continued growing at 
around 20 % per annum in 2010 and 2011 and the number of articles in 
2011 was an estimated 330,000. The share of all SCOPUS or all ISI 
articles is also rapidly rising and approaching 10 %.

The average quality level of OA journal articles in terms of citations 
received can be compared for journals indexed in either ISI or Scopus 
using impact factors (for Scopus the equivalent in the scimago site). 
While the global average "citedness" of all OA journal articles is 
around 70 % compated to toll-access journals the difference dissappears 
when comparing journals founded after 2000 or journals in say 
biomedicine published in the major industrial countries.

We haven't done much research concerning green OA but I have to note one 
thing. It might certainly be true that mandates raise the level of 
uploading from 15 % to say 60-70 % but what counts is not the number of 
institutions or funders with mandates but what share of the total global 
article volume their mandates cover. In Finland there are 30 institutes 
with mandates, which looks very impressive, but only two have real 
significance, Universities of Helsinki and Tampere, the rest are 28 
regionally based "polytechniques" the teachers of which rarely publish 
article of broader global interest.

So the evidence seems to show that gold (excluding hybrid) is growing 
quite rapidly, whereas I'm not aware of any research showing similar 
growth rates for green in recent years.

Bo-Christer Björk

References:

Björk, Bo-Christer, Solomon, David, 2012, Open Access versus 
subscription journals – A comparison of scientific impact, submitted to 
BMC medicine

Björk, Bo-Christer, 2012. The hybrid model for open access publication 
of scholarly articles – a failed experiment? Accepted for publishing 
March 2012, Journal of the American Society of Information Sciences and 
Technology,
OA copy at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/hybrid/index.php

Solomon, David, Björk, Bo-Christer, 2011. A study of Open Access 
Journals using article processing charges. Accepted for publishing 
February 2012, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 
and Technology, OA copy at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/

Laakso M, Welling P, Lovasz-Bukvova, H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, Hedlund T. 
2011. The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 
2009, PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. , 13.6.2011, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961


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[GOAL] Re: Elsevier's query re: "positive things from publishersthat should be encouraged, celebrated, recognized"

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear All,

I've been following this debate with interest from the sidelines for a 
few days. As some of you may have noticed our research has in the last 
couple of years been focused on providing empirical facts about OA. Here 
are a few very recent findings.

Hybrid OA is a failure, the main reason being the almost uniform 3000 
USD price level which can be contrasted with an average of around 900 
USD calculated over around 100,000 APC OA articles published in 2010. 
The uptake of hybrid was around 13,000 articles in 2011 over more than 
4,000 journals, meaning an uptake of 1-2% of eligible article and less 
than 1 % of the global article volume.

Gold OA published in DOAJ registered journals has continued growing at 
around 20 % per annum in 2010 and 2011 and the number of articles in 
2011 was an estimated 330,000. The share of all SCOPUS or all ISI 
articles is also rapidly rising and approaching 10 %.

The average quality level of OA journal articles in terms of citations 
received can be compared for journals indexed in either ISI or Scopus 
using impact factors (for Scopus the equivalent in the scimago site). 
While the global average "citedness" of all OA journal articles is 
around 70 % compated to toll-access journals the difference dissappears 
when comparing journals founded after 2000 or journals in say 
biomedicine published in the major industrial countries.

We haven't done much research concerning green OA but I have to note one 
thing. It might certainly be true that mandates raise the level of 
uploading from 15 % to say 60-70 % but what counts is not the number of 
institutions or funders with mandates but what share of the total global 
article volume their mandates cover. In Finland there are 30 institutes 
with mandates, which looks very impressive, but only two have real 
significance, Universities of Helsinki and Tampere, the rest are 28 
regionally based "polytechniques" the teachers of which rarely publish 
article of broader global interest.

So the evidence seems to show that gold (excluding hybrid) is growing 
quite rapidly, whereas I'm not aware of any research showing similar 
growth rates for green in recent years.

Bo-Christer Björk

References:

Björk, Bo-Christer, Solomon, David, 2012, Open Access versus 
subscription journals – A comparison of scientific impact, submitted to 
BMC medicine

Björk, Bo-Christer, 2012. The hybrid model for open access publication 
of scholarly articles – a failed experiment? Accepted for publishing 
March 2012, Journal of the American Society of Information Sciences and 
Technology,
OA copy at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/hybrid/index.php

Solomon, David, Björk, Bo-Christer, 2011. A study of Open Access 
Journals using article processing charges. Accepted for publishing 
February 2012, Journal of the American Society for Information Science 
and Technology, OA copy at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/

Laakso M, Welling P, Lovasz-Bukvova, H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, Hedlund T. 
2011. The Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 
2009, PLoS ONE 6(6): e20961. , 13.6.2011, doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961


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[GOAL] Article on Innovative Features in Scholarly Open Access Journals

[Bo-Christer Björk]

FYI

Published today

Björk BC
A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open Access Journals
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e115
URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e115/
doi: 10.2196/jmir.1802

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[GOAL] Article on Innovative Features in Scholarly Open Access Journals

[Bo-Christer Björk]

FYI

Published today

Bj?rk BC
A Study of Innovative Features in Scholarly Open Access Journals
J Med Internet Res 2011;13(4):e115
URL: http://www.jmir.org/2011/4/e115/
doi: 10.2196/jmir.1802

New study on the development of gold OA 1993-2009 published

[Bo-Christer Björk]

Dear all,

we've just published the following article in Plos One
Laakso M, Welling P, Bukvova H, Nyman L, Björk B-C, et al. (2011) The 
Development of Open Access Journal Publishing from 1993 to 2009. PLoS 
ONE 6(6): e20961. doi:10.1371/journal.pone.0020961

The results show the tremendous growth of gold OA over the past decade

Best regards

Bo-Christer Björk