Recent results from the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons project that may be of interest:
2010 - 2016 APC journal comparison: attrition rate https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2017/03/30/2010-2016-apc-journals-comparison-attrition-rate/ In brief: we find an average 1.5% - 2% attrition rate for APC charging journals based on a comparison of data provided by Solomon &Björk for 2010 and our 2016 APC study. The reason for the variation is an anomaly of a particular business model best represented by Bentham Open, that is a new APC-based publisher starting off with a very large number of titles and then retaining only successful titles. Bentham Open, while still very active and publishing a large number of titles in 2016, accounts for more than half the attrition rate from 2010 - 2016. APC information: DOAJ v. publisher websites DOAJ now includes specific APC information for a number of titles (whether there is a charge or not, URL for further information, specific APC and currency). We compared APC information in DOAJ v. APC information on publisher websites for 3 publishers (Hindawi, MDPI and Taylor & Francis) to explore the viability of using DOAJ APC data for our longitudinal study of APCs. In brief, we found significant differences in APC information in DOAJ and on publisher websites, and have concluded that DOAJ's APC data is not sufficient for the longitudinal study. Details and links: https://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2017/03/29/apcs-in-doaj-2017-summary-of-3-studies/ Comment: my recommendation to DOAJ is to retain the question about whether there are publication charges, reinstate the "conditional" category because whether or not there is a charge often is conditional, for good reasons (e.g. journals that still publish in print may have print-based colour charges), and to retain the URL for information on publication charges. It is not clear that there are sufficient benefits to make it worthwhile to continue to include specific APC information. I anticipate that this information will become increasingly outdated unless DOAJ information is updated every time a publisher changes their price. DOAJ is an essential service that provides many different types of information to different audiences. I suggest that DOAJ staff time would be better spent on other activities, e.g. journal vetting to build the directory and working with journals on metadata export to facilitate article-level search. 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 Sustaining the Knowledge Commons: Open Access Scholarship http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/ http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html heather.morri...@uottawa.ca<mailto:heather.morri...@uottawa.ca>
_______________________________________________ GOAL mailing list GOAL@eprints.org http://mailman.ecs.soton.ac.uk/mailman/listinfo/goal
