Bo-Christer's observation that many of Elsevier's fully open access journals are university or society sponsored, most outside the US/UK, is what I see as well. It looks like many of these are new partnerships.
One question this raises for me: Is Elsevier reacting to the push towards open access by expanding? best, Heather -------- Original message -------- From: Bo-Christer Björk <bo-christer.bj...@hanken.fi> Date: 2017-01-15 5:22 AM (GMT-05:00) To: "Global Open Access List (Successor of AmSci)" <goal@eprints.org> Subject: Re: [GOAL] Elsevier as an open access publisher 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 <heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<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 <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 _______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
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