[GOAL] Fwd: Press Information: De Gruyter acquires Versita and becomes third-biggest international Open Access publisher
Of possible interest to list members. >> For immediate release. De Gruyter acquires Versita and becomes third-biggest international Open Access publisher Berlin, January 9, 2012 De Gruyter, the Berlin-based academic publishing company, is acquiring the publisher Versita. As a service provider to academic organizations and bodies, Versita publishes over 230 journals on Open Access basis, i.e. outside the traditional subscription model. With this acquisition De Gruyter is substantially increasing its presence in an important future market of academic publishing. The complete staff of Versita is being retained in this take-over. âThe purchase of Versita is a logical continuation of our publishing strategy of recent years, which involves giving both our authors and our customers an optimum range of publishing optionsâ, says Dr. Sven Fund, the Managing Director of De Gruyter. âFor us, the most important issue is that our publications have high-quality content, and not how they are financed.â As of 2012 De Gruyter will be merging the newly acquired Open Access journals with its traditional subscription-based and freely sold content on one electronic platform, thus providing researchers with an outstanding service: users will have a powerful search interface for searching all academic articles from journals, books and databanks in which the articles have been published, independently of the various business models. âFor some time now, Open Access has been an important element of academic publishing. With the integration of all Versita content under a joint publishing administration on the new De Gruyter platform, we are now realizing the principle in our program,â continues Fund. In the future, De Gruyterâs Open Access activities will be managed by Jacek Ciesielski as Vice President Open Access. Ciesielski founded Versita in 2001 and has been expanding the enterprise ever since. âNow that we have joined forces with De Gruyter, I look forward to further developing and internationalizing my activities together with De Gruyterâ, comments Ciesielski.  Contact: Ulrike Lippe Manager Public Relations Phone +49(0)30-260 05 153 ulrike.li...@degruyter.com   De Gruyter: The independent academic publishing house De Gruyter can look back on a history spanning over 260 years. The publishing group with headquarters in Berlin and Boston annually publishes over 800 new titles in the humanities, medicine, science and law and more than 230 journals and digital media. http://www.degruyter.com/  Versita publishes about 250 own and third-party scholarly journals across many disciplines. Its journal portfolio takes in 25 subscription-based journals, including a group of Central European Journals in 8 disciplines. Versita also publishes over 230 society journals, which are available through Versita Open (www.versitaopen.com), one of the largest Open Access platforms in the world. The company was established in 2001 by Jacek Ciesielski. http://www.versita.com/  [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Fwd: Press Information: De Gruyter acquires Versita and becomes third-biggest international Open Access publisher
Of possible interest to list members. >> > For immediate release. > > De Gruyter acquires Versita and becomes third-biggest international Open > Access publisher > > Berlin, January 9, 2012 > > De Gruyter, the Berlin-based academic publishing company, is acquiring the > publisher Versita. As a service provider to academic organizations and > bodies, Versita publishes over 230 journals on Open Access basis, i.e. > outside the traditional subscription model. With this acquisition De Gruyter > is substantially increasing its presence in an important future market of > academic publishing. The complete staff of Versita is being retained in this > take-over. > > ?The purchase of Versita is a logical continuation of our publishing strategy > of recent years, which involves giving both our authors and our customers an > optimum range of publishing options?, says Dr. Sven Fund, the Managing > Director of De Gruyter. ?For us, the most important issue is that our > publications have high-quality content, and not how they are financed.? > > As of 2012 De Gruyter will be merging the newly acquired Open Access journals > with its traditional subscription-based and freely sold content on one > electronic platform, thus providing researchers with an outstanding service: > users will have a powerful search interface for searching all academic > articles from journals, books and databanks in which the articles have been > published, independently of the various business models. > > ?For some time now, Open Access has been an important element of academic > publishing. With the integration of all Versita content under a joint > publishing administration on the new De Gruyter platform, we are now > realizing the principle in our program,? continues Fund. > > In the future, De Gruyter?s Open Access activities will be managed by Jacek > Ciesielski as Vice President Open Access. Ciesielski founded Versita in 2001 > and has been expanding the enterprise ever since. ?Now that we have joined > forces with De Gruyter, I look forward to further developing and > internationalizing my activities together with De Gruyter?, comments > Ciesielski. > > > Contact: > Ulrike Lippe > Manager Public Relations > Phone +49(0)30-260 05 153 > ulrike.lippe at degruyter.com > > > De Gruyter: The independent academic publishing house De Gruyter can look > back on a history spanning over 260 years. The publishing group with > headquarters in Berlin and Boston annually publishes over 800 new titles in > the humanities, medicine, science and law and more than 230 journals and > digital media. http://www.degruyter.com/ > > > Versita publishes about 250 own and third-party scholarly journals across > many disciplines. Its journal portfolio takes in 25 subscription-based > journals, including a group of Central European Journals in 8 disciplines. > Versita also publishes over 230 society journals, which are available through > Versita Open (www.versitaopen.com), one of the largest Open Access platforms > in the world. The company was established in 2001 by Jacek Ciesielski. > http://www.versita.com/ > -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120109/497ecfab/attachment.html
[GOAL] Counting researchers - some results
I recently posed to this list the question âHow many researchers are there in the world?â and gave some rough estimates that bounded the result N by 1M < N < 10M. I have received several very useful pieces of data (and some non-useful responses). The question is clearly relevant to the production rate of articles.  My best estimate of N is now 3.60M researchers in 2012. This is based on the UNESCO Science Report 2010 which details researchers by country, and this is an extrapolation from 2 354 851 in 2002 and 2 979 913 in 2007. Note: This figure is to be treated with caution, because of the following factors: 1.     I use the FTE counts which are higher than the headcounts. On inspection, many countries (such as Canada, USA and Australia) did not supply UNESCO with headcounts. I could have fudged the two categories together but the precision of the data did not seem to warrant that. 2.     The raw data is itself subject to various errors. The footnote to the Table states âText Box: â Text Box: â Text Box: â Text Box: â Text Box: â ân/+n = data refer to n years before or after reference year; a = university graduates instead of researchers; b = break in series with previous year for which data are shown; e = estimation; g = underestimated or partial data; h = overestimated or based on overestimated data.â 3.     Not all of these researchers are what I call âproducing researchersâ: researchers who (co)author articles which could be made open access. It is difficult to determine this factor though use of article-based author-lists or author IDs may be useful. This is probably the biggest uncertainty in the data, and means that 3.60M is probably an over-estimate.  One of the reasons I wanted to know this value is to see how large the Mendeley count of users is â they report 1.43M at time of writing. Some of these are not âproducing researchersâ, but are people searching literature for work, hobby or medical purposes, but private communication suggests this is a relatively small fraction of the total. In any case, just to do the raw numbers: 1.4M / 3.60M = 40%. If point 3 above dominates, this is an under-estimate of Mendeleyâs penetration as a researcher tool.  What this implies is that 40% (or whatever) of researchers in the world are using Mendeley, and have the potential to make their work open access by simple actions. Les Carr has blogged that the level of people doing this is about the same as the level achieved in his University of Southampton departmental mandated repository. Thatâs good news in itself. However, it now poses a new set of questions: are the researchers in Mendeley different from those represented in institutional repositories, the same ones, or what is the overlap? Surely this will vary by discipline?  If the user sets their own works to be OA, and the users are disjoint from repository users, then that implies that the Titanium Road (social networking OA) is making significant progress in the OA campaign in its own right, and growing at about 37% from June 2011 to January 2012. The complementary approach to institutional repositories may be valuable.  [IMAGE]  The same question may be asked of articles, but it is more difficult to draw conclusions. An article may be put into a repository and made OA by one co-author, and into Mendeley and made OA by another. I argue this is a net benefit - the more copies of an article on the Internet the better (within reason) though not as useful as a new article made OA. Some however may simply be focussed solely on different article counts and think of this as a waste of effort. No matter â it seems that social networking tools are proving useful in achieving OA.  Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia  [ Part 1.2, Image/PNG (Name: "image001.png") 189 bytes. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 1.3, Image/PNG (Name: "image002.png") 186 bytes. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 1.4, Image/PNG (Name: "image003.png") 186 bytes. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 1.5, Image/PNG (Name: "image006.png") 21 KB. ] [ Unable to print this part. ] [ Part 2: "Attached Text" ] ___ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
[GOAL] Counting researchers - some results
I recently posed to this list the question ?How many researchers are there in the world?? and gave some rough estimates that bounded the result N by 1M < N < 10M. I have received several very useful pieces of data (and some non-useful responses). The question is clearly relevant to the production rate of articles. My best estimate of N is now 3.60M researchers in 2012. This is based on the UNESCO Science Report 2010 which details researchers by country, and this is an extrapolation from 2 354 851 in 2002 and 2 979 913 in 2007. Note: This figure is to be treated with caution, because of the following factors: 1. I use the FTE counts which are higher than the headcounts. On inspection, many countries (such as Canada, USA and Australia) did not supply UNESCO with headcounts. I could have fudged the two categories together but the precision of the data did not seem to warrant that. 2. The raw data is itself subject to various errors. The footnote to the Table states ?Text Box: ?Text Box: ?Text Box: ?Text Box: ?Text Box: ??n/+n = data refer to n years before or after reference year; a = university graduates instead of researchers; b = break in series with previous year for which data are shown; e = estimation; g = underestimated or partial data; h = overestimated or based on overestimated data.? 3. Not all of these researchers are what I call ?producing researchers?: researchers who (co)author articles which could be made open access. It is difficult to determine this factor though use of article-based author-lists or author IDs may be useful. This is probably the biggest uncertainty in the data, and means that 3.60M is probably an over-estimate. One of the reasons I wanted to know this value is to see how large the Mendeley count of users is ? they report 1.43M at time of writing. Some of these are not ?producing researchers?, but are people searching literature for work, hobby or medical purposes, but private communication suggests this is a relatively small fraction of the total. In any case, just to do the raw numbers: 1.4M / 3.60M = 40%. If point 3 above dominates, this is an under-estimate of Mendeley?s penetration as a researcher tool. What this implies is that 40% (or whatever) of researchers in the world are using Mendeley, and have the potential to make their work open access by simple actions. Les Carr has blogged that the level of people doing this is about the same as the level achieved in his University of Southampton departmental mandated repository. That?s good news in itself. However, it now poses a new set of questions: are the researchers in Mendeley different from those represented in institutional repositories, the same ones, or what is the overlap? Surely this will vary by discipline? If the user sets their own works to be OA, and the users are disjoint from repository users, then that implies that the Titanium Road (social networking OA) is making significant progress in the OA campaign in its own right, and growing at about 37% from June 2011 to January 2012. The complementary approach to institutional repositories may be valuable. The same question may be asked of articles, but it is more difficult to draw conclusions. An article may be put into a repository and made OA by one co-author, and into Mendeley and made OA by another. I argue this is a net benefit - the more copies of an article on the Internet the better (within reason) though not as useful as a new article made OA. Some however may simply be focussed solely on different article counts and think of this as a waste of effort. No matter ? it seems that social networking tools are proving useful in achieving OA. Arthur Sale University of Tasmania, Australia -- next part -- An HTML attachment was scrubbed... URL: http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120109/91b445b2/attachment-0001.html -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/png Size: 181 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120109/91b445b2/attachment-0004.png -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/png Size: 178 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120109/91b445b2/attachment-0005.png -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/png Size: 178 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120109/91b445b2/attachment-0006.png -- next part -- A non-text attachment was scrubbed... Name: not available Type: image/png Size: 21276 bytes Desc: not available Url : http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/pipermail/goal/attachments/20120109/91b445b2/attachmen
