Let the competition begin! Dramatic Growth of Open Access June 30, 2011

Update July 5, 2011 - that there are now more than 10,000 OJS installations (thanks to Kevin Stranack), up more than 1,000 installations for 10% growth (40% annual equivalent) this quarter; also note one addition to the section on competition below. Update July 1, 2011 - correction: note that Palgrave MacMillan is offering hybrid open access, not a full OA journal as I had thought. Thanks to Roddy MacLeod. See below for further reflection and a link to Roddy's post.

This issue briefly highlights and celebrates the accomplishments to date of open access to the medical literature, and explores whether open access has already begun a new phase of competition that will accelerate growth yet again.

In the 1990's when I worked at a small university college, access to the medical index Medline was on a for-pay basis, something we could not afford, certainly not to offer on a routine basis to students. The first major success story of open access to the medical literature was when the U.S. National Library of Medicine made the index available for free as PubMed. Today, not only is the index available for free, we can also connect directly with 3.3 million of the articles indexed for free, too. The Public Access Policy of the N.I.H. is definitely a factor. Visible compliance with the strong April 2008 policy, by my calculations, is now 72%. 1,176 journals are voluntarily contributing content to PMC; of these, a majority, 616 journals, are open access.

From pioneering to consolidation - to competition?

Laakso, M. et al (2011) published a major study in PLoS One, illustrating a tenfold increase in open access journal publishing from 1993 to 2009. The authors interpret the data as illustrating three phases of open access journal publishing in this period: The Pioneering years (1993–1999), the Innovation years (2000–2004), and the Consolidation years (2005–2009).

This issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access includes a preliminary exploration of a thesis that OA journal publishing may have already entered a new, most welcome phase: the Competition Years (2010 - ). A few comparisons are included - to spur the competition along!

Quick reference (viewing)
Quick reference (download as excel or PDF)
Rationale and method
Dataverse for downloading data

Selected numbers

• DOAJ 6,694 titles growth rate 4 titles / day
• Electronic Journals Library (free journals of academic interest) 29,000 titles, growth rate 11 titles / day
• OpenDOAR 1,980 repositories growth rate 1 / day
• BASE 29 million documents, growth rate 11,000 / day
• ROARMAP 289 open access mandate policies
• PubMedCentral:
  

1,176 journals actively participating; increase of 92 this quarter, 1 journal / day;

721 journals immediate free access; increase of 59 this quarter

616 all articles open access; increase of 51 this quarter

Competition, anyone? This section looks at the best sources for lots of quality free content - documents and journals, acknowledging that this is the tip of the iceberg and welcoming cooperation - or competition - in tracking and assessing sources.

Best sources for lots of free documents

1. BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine) 28.9 million
2. PubMed 3.3 million
3. Highwire Free 2.1 million
4. Mendeley 1 million
5. RePEC (Research Papers in Economics) 925,000
6. arXiv 685,000
7. DOAJ article search 585,527
8. Social Science Research Network (SSRN) 282,000 full-text papers
   

Best sources for vetted lists of active, peer reviewed, fully open access journals

1. DOAJ 6,694 journals
2. Open J-Gate 6,042 peer-reviewed english-language journals

Best sources for free journals

1. Electronic Journals Library 29,000 free journals
2. PubMedCentral journals list 1,176 journals participate; 721 have immediate free access, 616 all articles open access - title list available for free download

Milestones this quarter (that I noted) include ROARMAP exceeding 200 open access mandate policies (not counting theses), E-LIS reaching 12,000 documents, and Springer Open launched its 50th journal. Congratulations to PLoS ONE for being named SPARC Open Access Innovator - and making Public Library of Science the world's largest not-for-profit open access publisher.

Open access competition years: a preliminary argument

Following my open research approach, this argument is presented for review and critique. The basic idea is that the momentum of the open access movement already has, or soon will, create a critical mass that will transform all of scholarly publishing into a default open access position. The work of Laakso, M. et al. (2011), and my own Dramatic Growth research project, demonstrates consistent strong to dramatic growth of open access from 1993 to the present time. Laakso et al paint a picture of consistent growth, the Consolidation Years, up to 2009, while my perspective is that since this time frame, the landscape for scholarly publishing has changed in some significant ways.

One key change is that the competition tables have turned; in the early years, it was the open access publishers competing against the traditional subscription-based publishers, but today, there is a growing pool of traditional subscription-based publishers actively competing for what they obviously see as an open access marketplace. As noted above, Springer Open recently launched their 50th journal. At inception, Public Library of Science aimed to compete with the likes of Nature and Science; starting this month, Nature's new journal, Nature Communications, is actively and obviously competing with PLoS ONE, now the world's largest journal. Other traditional publishers that have come out with what appear to be serious efforts at competing in an open access environment includes Wiley, with Wiley Open. These are all fully open access journals. It is important to distinguish this from the tendency to develop hybrid open access journals, which is also growing, with Palgrave MacMillan a recent entry into this somewhat open environment. Thanks to Roddy MacLeod for pointing out some of the deficiencies of this hybrid environment in his post Subscription journals with open access content. In brief, the difficulty for readers to locate this information suggests minimal advantage for authors publishing in these venues as compared to publishing in fully open access journals, or publishing in subscription-based journals and self-archiving at no charge, and the likely dangers of double-dipping (increasing costs as libraries pay for subscriptions and additional payments are made for article processing fees), suggests that this model holds little promise for readers, authors, libraries, or, in the long term, journals and publishers. This model may well be useful for journals and publishers in the short term as a means of developing procedures to move towards full open access, but my view is that hybrid OA journals is not a sustainable model for the long term. Rather, hybrid approaches may be best viewed as like using training wheels to learn to ride a bike; helpful to get started, but the sooner they come off, the better.

This development seems sure to change the trajectory of open access growth - upwards - for several reasons. As traditional publishers gain confidence and success in open access publishing, there will be less reason to fight open access. Faculty preferring traditional publishers will find that more and more often, they do not have to choose between open access and their preferred publisher; they can have their cake and eat it too.Obviously, the entry of traditional publishers increases the number of open access journals. Perhaps a little less obviously, traditional publishers delving into open access publishing will divert content from subscription-based journals. Another way to make this point: I am predicting that as the proportion of open access content rises, the proportion of subscription-bound content will decrease.

In addition to the entry of traditional publishers into open access, a recent news release by the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, the Wellcome Trust, and the Max Planck Institute announced plans to develop a new open-access journal aiming to compete at the top tier. It is noteworthy that not only is this a new journal; this is a whole new type of publisher. Update July 5th: just days after the HHMI/Wellcome Trust/Max Planck announcement, traditional publisher the Royal Society announced their new fully open access journal, Open Biology, which appears to be following very much the same model - full OA, rapid publishing, scientific experts in charge of the editing process. Good luck to both!

Another example of a new journal that appears highly likely to be a serious competitor in its field, a publication of a well-established society in an emerging field, is G3: Genes, Genomes, Genetics. To me, it seems only natural that a new journal will be open access, and I expect that this trend will increase in the coming years. A few years ago, the default for new journals was a subscriptions basis. Today, this just doesn't make any sense. An online-only journal with no authentication mechanisms speeds up dissemination, and costs less. Besides, with library budgets already tied up in the big deal, what chance does a new subscriptions-based journal have?

Some preliminary research I reported on in March in the post Those ACTIVE! Open Access Journals illustrates that at least some relatively recent open access journals and publishers already have a higher rate of journal retention (still active after a few years) than some of the top names in traditional publishing.

To wrap things up, it looks to me like we can not only expect the current OA momentum to continue, but that are forces already at play that are likely to accelerate the transition to OA as default: movement by traditional publishers to compete in the open access environment; logic favoring open access for new publications; and as the move continues to open access, we should anticipate that some of the increase will come from diversion of articles from toll to open access venues. One of the implications for libraries is that when signing a long-term contract with a publisher, it is a good idea to remember that you are purchasing access to articles that have not yet been published - and may never be published, at least not by that publisher. Language protecting yet in case the publishers' product diminishes is advised.

References & bibliography of recent items on open access growth

ROARMAP's Green Open Access Mandates Pass the 200 Mark. Note that this is not counting thesis mandates.

Carr, L. (20110). Mendeley: downloads vs upload growth. Repository Man. http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-download-vs-upload-growth.html and Mendeley: measuring OA rates http://repositoryman.blogspot.com/2011/06/mendeley-measuring-oa-rates.html

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
Tenfold increase in OA publishing over last 10 years PLOS ONE

Richard Poyner Open Access by Numbers

Taylor, Ann. New open access content made available by the Digital Commons Community. Recently went live: 3 new sites, 5 conferences, 6 journals, 44 image galleries, and 13 book galleries.

Whitfield, John Open access comes of age. Nature News, June 21, 2011.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Elsevier profits and faculty priorities

According to this article in the Economist, last year Elsevier made $1.1 billion in profit last year, for a profit margin of 36%. Most of Elsevier's revenue, and hence profit, comes from academic library budgets.

Faculty have largely been shielded from the economic impact of this profit-taking from my academy, and to date most discussions about faculty publishing choices have focused on the academic freedom of faculty to publish where they please.

Is it timely to bring the economics home to faculty in a more direct way than pointing out the impact on faculty budgets? If a university were to cancel a $2 million a year Elsevier contract, this money could be redirected, couldn't it? Why not redirect $1 million a year to affordable / sustainable options such as open access publishing, and the other half to academic salaries? $1 million a year could fund 10 academic positions at $100,000 a year - or give 1,000 faculty a $1,000 a year raise.

If faculty were to see things this way, I wonder how many would agree with me that a flourishing open access scholarly publishing system is actually the optimal system for academic freedom?

Mandating sustainability. Would Elsevier survive?

Elsevier's latest anti-open access tactic appears to be looking for extra $$$ (surprise, surprise) from institutions that mandate open access, specifically quoting Elsevier's Alicia Wise:

The systematic posting of manuscripts, for example because of a mandate to post, is only agreeable if done in ways that are sustainable for the underlying journal. From: https://mx2.arl.org/Lists/SPARC-OAForum/Message/5878.html.

Comment: if universities are considering mandates and economic sustainability for scholarly publishing, why not include a mandate supporting economically sustainable publications / publishers? For example, why not direct tenure and promotion committees to give added weight to affordable / open access publishing choices, if an author indicates that they have rejected high cost / poor access choices?

Would Elsevier survive such a mandate? Aside from high costs, Elsevier appears to be showing a lot less adaptability than other commercial publishers, such as Springer, Wiley, Nature, now Palgrave MacMillan, all of whom now have what appear to be full and serious open access options. Indeed, it seems that a very large percentage of the commercial scholarly publishing sector is poised to be competitive in an open access future, with Elsevier being the exception. My conclusion is that if economic sustainability for scholarly communication is mandated - as I would argue that it should be - and Elsevier continues to show little or no ability to adapt to the current environment, Elsevier's days are numbered. And this may be a good thing.

Advocacy strategies for open access to agricultural research

Many thanks to students in my LIBR 559K class this spring (the open access class) for a great discussion on advocacy strategies for open access to the agricultural literature. Following is a summary of the discussion, posted with permission of the class, which will be cross-posted to the course blog.

Advocacy strategies for open access to the agricultural literature - summary of class discussion

Tension between public good and agribusiness - talking points

• taxpayer funding
  
• impacts everyone - whole world - we all eat (are food consumers)
  
• food security / avoiding starvation and famine
  
• food safety
  
• how much funding to research on turf & lawn as compared to food? what's more important?
  
• linkages with health and environmental science
  
• counter to disinformation (e.g. pesticides)
  
• agribusiness - tie conditions to subsidies?
  

Agriculture as a public good - possible alliances

• small / family farms
  
• rural populations
  
• organic farmers
  
• farmers' market customers
  

Strategies for talking with agricultural researchers

• medicine has prestige and lots of OA / good role model
  
• can the farmers who might benefit from this research access your articles?
  
• adapting information to local conditions (an argument for re-use?)
  

Why scholarship should never be a commodity!

Presentation, graduate panel, Western Canada Speaker Series, Simon Fraser University Wednesday May 18, 2011. Moderator: Rick Gruneau.

Why scholarship should never be a commodity! (Or, transformative change for scholarly communication for communication scholars). For a version of this presentation which includes a bit of explanation of what I am talking about, download the presentation-of-a-presentation from my SLAIS LIBR 559L course blog.

Housekeeping: e-mail glitch?

Thanks to Pamela for reporting what appears to be a glitch with the e-mail for IJPE - the September 30, 2010 Dramatic Growth was sent out today. My understanding is that there have been some serious issues with blogger lately - at least I am able to post, unlike others - my best guess is that this might have happened as google staff worked to fix these problems. Apologies for the confusion, and please let me know when things like this happen, at hgmorris at sfu dot ca

Access Copyright: NOT a member

May 16 update: please see the May 3, 2011 Canadian Association of University Teachers Copyright Guidelines for a really good explanation of our rights in Canada under fair dealing, and kudos for covering the fact that an increasing portion of academic work is now fully open access - downloable from http://www.caut.ca/pages.asp?page=18

Original post

Access Copyright is a copyright collective in Canada that has recently proposed a tariff that phenomenally outrageous, including price increases that are more than tenfold the previous negotiated agreement (which was already far too generous), but also includes reporting requirements that are onerous and completely incompatible with both privacy and academic freedom, as well as the ludicrous proposition that linking to an item is considered a copy. As a prolific writer, presenter, and occasional photographer who (like a great many people) prefers to share work openly, it is my wish to make it known that Access Copyright does NOT represent this creator! I have created an Access Copyright: NOT a member facebook page for anyone who would like to join me in making this clarification. Vendors and publishers are more than welcome. For that matter, why not prominently post an Access Copyright non-membership notice on your website?

This insanity is not limited to Canada, it seems, as is clear from this post, A nightmare scenario for higher education, from scholarly communication@duke.

What an awesome opportunity for open access advocates!

Open access: small victory over procrastination

Just posted a study published in Research Strategies in 1997, Information Literacy Skills: an exploratory focus group study of student perceptions. Why the delay? When I published the study, copyright was held by Research Strategies. The journal was subsequently bought by Elsevier, which has a green OA policy - for the author's own copy - but finding the author's copy for a 1997 article is not exactly easy. Neither was finding an author's agreement; a few years ago, I contacted Elsevier and asked them for a copy of the contract, but it turns out that they don't have one either. So now after a few more years of procrastinating I have finally posted the publishers' PDF - I am teaching scholarly communication and open access after all, and ought to be as good an example as I can - on the assumption that if no one has a contract, none exists. It would be helpful if IR managers and publishers alike would clarify permission in such circumstances - keep the author's self-archiving rights for the author's own work without embargo, but allow use of the publisher's PDF after say 3 years? Anyhow this study is now more widely available, having been posted in the SFU IR, UBC cIRcle, E-LIS, Mendeley, and Academia.edu, with links from Facebook and Twitter. Alas, I am not on any information literacy listservs. SWORD people - are you looking after all of these venues and more? A single upload could sure accomplish more dissemination with less keystrokes.

Open access: definitions and major initiatives

Open access: definitions and major initiatives is an early draft of a chapter (or part of a chapter) of my thesis. Designed as a basic overview, this is an updated and revised version of the open access chapter of my book Scholarly Communication for Librarians (Oxford: Chandos, 2009). The early release is part of my open thesis approach, and also to make this chapter freely available online to students of my UBC SLAIS classes this spring, LIBR 559L (scholarly communication) and LIBR 559K (open access), for whom this is required reading. This is actually a second revision, as another version is currently under review as part of a book project for the ALCTS section of ALA (eds. Pamela Bluh and Cindy Hepfer). The original chapter can be viewed in E-LIS.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access March 31 2011

Highlights

The most amazing growth story of the first quarter of 2011 is that of Mendeley, jumping half a million articles downloadable for free, from 300,000 to 800,000, growth of 171% in just one quarter!! Since Mendeley is a DIY tool for researchers, this amazing growth illustrates that there is a considerable appetite for self-archiving, once the researcher has a service that appeals to them. (See Mendeley update at bottom of this post for more). Analysis this quarter focuses on the strong growth rate of so many open access initiatives in comparison to the overall 3-3.5% average growth of scholarly articles and journals. Data is presented that strongly suggests that the success rate for open access journals is already higher than that of subscription journals in this and a related post, Those Active Open Access Journals!. Congratulations to DOAJ for announcing the DOAJ new interface - and surpassing the milestone of more than half a million articles available through the DOAJ article search! As DOAJ's Anna-Lena Johannson expresses it: DOAJ now has more than 6,300 journals, more than 100 countries, over 50 languages, and more than 2,500 journals providing metadata at article level. . Another indication of the international reach of the open access movement from Katarina Lovrecic; there are 133 OA journals in Croatia, and 129 or 97% of the journals in the Croatian Hrčak portal are open access. An additional 47 journals are actively participating in PubMedCentral; the growth for journals in PMC providing immediate free access is 40, and the full open access PMC journal growth rate is 33. This issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access introduces two new features for the very busy - a quick numbers section, and a quick reference edition.

Quick Numbers

# of open access journals (DOAJ): over 6,000. Growth rate: 4 per day.
# of freely available journals (Electronic Journals Library): over 28,000. Growth rate: 10 per day.
# of open access repositories: close to 2,000 (OpenDOAR). Growth rate: 1 per day.
# of documents freely available (BASE): 25 million. Growth rate: 6,000 per day.
# of open access mandate policies (ROARMAP): 271. Growth rate: 1 per week or 5 per month.
% of world's scholarly literature that is freely available: 20% (Bjork et al)

For more detail and references, see the Quick Reference. The Quick Reference is available for downloading as a PDF or excel file from the SFU IR.

Open access growth compares VERY favorably with overall growth of scholarship

These charts illustrate just how dramatic the growth of open access is, in comparison with the overall average growth rates of scholarship of 3% (for articles) and 3.5% (for journals) calculated by Mabe (and cited by Ware). In 2004, a little over 62,000 articles were searchable through DOAJ, compared with over 500,000 today (490,000 at the end of 2010). IF DOAJ article search had been growing at the average rate of 3% per year, there would now be about 75,000 articles available through the DOAJ article search. DOAJ article search has grown about 7 times what one would expect given the average scholarly article growth overall over the past 6 years.


Similarly, DOAJ titles are growing much more rapidly than the overall average growth in scholarly journals of 3.5% annually. In the past 6 years, DOAJ has grown from 1,400 to over 6,000 journals. At the average 3.5% annual rate, DOAJ would now be at about 1,700 journals. DOAJ journal titles are growing more than 3 times faster than the average growth rate for scholarly journals.

In the past 10 years, BioMedCentral has grown from 241 submissions to over 35,000 submissions annually (thanks to BMC's Tara Cronin). IF BMC were growing at the average rate of 3%, we would expect only 338 submissions annually! BMC article submissions have grown over a hundred times more than one would have expected at the average growth rate for scholarly journal articles.

In a related post, the phenomenon of Those Active Open Access Journals is explored. It seems that - according to data obtained from Ulrich's - there is strong evidence to suggest that open access journals are more likely to continue to be active after a few years than journals published by some of the top commercial publishers!

Downloadable data for the Dramatic Growth of Open Access can be found at the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dataverse.

Mendeley update April 1, 2011

Listserve discussion on SCHOLCOMM

On Fri, Apr 1, 2011 at 2:40 AM, Steve Hitchcock wrote:
Heather, Thank you for the data from your Dramatic Growth of Open Access series. The latest release certainly begins with a striking figure, but it probably needs some explanation and context. Where do the figures for freely downloadable articles from Mendeley come from, and what is meant in Mendeley by 'self-archiving'?

William Gun, Head of Academic Outreach, Mendeley replied:

Heather, thanks for the post. Steve, the numbers come from self-archived papers and papers marked open access in our catalog. We're currently doing a pilot project to sync the papers in a researcher's My Publications folder with their local institutional repository, so hopefully this will encourage more researchers to make their work available in this manner, where they can. You can see more about the project here: http://jisc-dura.blogspot.com/

Comment: it sounds to me like this sort of initiative has tremendous potential to advance the open access archiving movement. If self-archiving in the IR facilitates getting your work into services that faculty seem to like such as Mendeley (and what about academia.edu), that would only help with getting content into the IR. Plus I wonder what the possibilities are for linking back FROM Mendeley to the IR (or other library services)? Any discussions happening along these lines?


References

Cronin, T. (2011). Personal correspondence.

Mabe, M., & Amin, M. (2001). Growth dynamics of scholarly and scientific journals. Scientometrics, 51(1), 147-162.

Mabe, M. (2011). Personal correspondence.

Ware, M. (2006). Scientific publishing in transition: An overview of current developments. Bristol, UK: Association of Learned and Professional Society Publishers; STM. Retrieved from http://pdf.aandamar.com/pdf/scientific-publishing-in-transition-an-overview-of-current.html

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Those ACTIVE Open Access Journals!

In brief, this post presents data illustrating that scholarly open access journals have rates of ongoing activity that compare VERY favorably with subscriptions-based journals (i.e. not being cancelled), based on data gleaned from Ulrich's. Also worth noting is the number of journals going back some time that are now open access - 370 journals listed as open access in Ulrich's started publishing before 1960, and of these, 98% are still active! All of the searches that I am talking about are limited to academic/scholarly, refereed journals. Ulrich's lists 3,525 such open access journals (a far cry from DOAJ's more than 6,300). Of the journals listed in Ulrich's as OA, 3,458, or 98%, are listed as active. This compares VERY favorably with ALL academic/scholarly, refereed journals, a total of 32,058, of which 28,269 or 88% are active.

Could this reflect a certain reticence on the part of Ulrich's to include open access journals until they are pretty sure that they are going to be around for a while? That would explain the discrepancy between Ulrich's OA journal list and DOAJ's. Let's look at a few other figures. The chart on the left shows the percentage of active journals by publisher. On the left-hand side, we see that the publishers with the highest percentage of active journals are open access publishers Copernicus and Hindawi with 100% and 99% active titles respectively, while on the right hand side we see that two subscriptions-based publishers, Elsevier and Taylor & Francis, have a much lower percentage of active titles overall, 85%.

The chart on the right shows the percentage of active academic/scholarly, refereed journals for open access as a whole, and for a few selected publishers both open access and subscriptions based, for journals started in the last ten (10) years, from 2001 to 2010. Note that on the left side of the chart, open access publisher Copernicus has the highest percentage of active journals, 100%, followed closely by open access as a whole with 98%. On the right hand side, we see that Elsevier, with 89% of journals started in this time frame still active, has a lower percentage of active titles than at least 4 open access publishers (Copernicus, Hindawi, BioMed Central, and Public Library of Science). Still, this could reflect a hesitancy about open access on the part of Ulrich's. I should note here that I needed to correct some of Ulrich's figures, as a number of thriving PLoS journals were listed as cancelled, apparently because they cancelled print subscriptions (in favor of a leading-edge print-on-demand service).




If Ulrich's is hesitating to add open access journals, perhaps this reflects a tendency to be conservative about adding new titles or publishers. This might make some sense - even DOAJ waits to be sure that a new journal actually publishes a bit before adding titles. To account for this, I looked at open access journals from a wide time range, and found that the percentage of active academic/scholarly, refereed open access journals was 93% or better for every time range I looked at, going back to before 1960! Needless to say, this compares VERY favorably with the 88% active titles for ALL academic/scholarly, refereed journals from all time ranges.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Review of Scholarly Communications for Librarians

Just came across this review of my book Scholarly Communication for Librarians (Oxford: Chandos, 2009).

Citation for review: Macevičiūtė E. (2009). Review of: Morrison, Heather. Scholarly communication for librarians. Oxford: Chandos Publishing, 2009. Information Research, 14(4), review no. R359 [Available at: http://informationr.net/ir/reviews/revs359.html]

NO to Google Books Settlement. Hurray for academics, access to knowledge and democracy!

Today Judge Chin released a judgment Declining the Google Books Settlement. This is a victory for academia, access to knowledge, and democracy - here is why.

The Google Books Settlement is an attempt to settle a class action suit brought by some authors and publishers objecting to the Google Books project. The Google Books project per se involves digitizing library collections to provide searching for in-copyright works with fair use snippets and free access to out-of-print works, a very worthy project. The Settlement, however, had some major flaws, as Chin's judgment notes.

One significant flaw is that the plaintiffs do not represent all authors, and objections by academic authors are noted in particular: "The academic author objectors, for example, note that their interests and values differ from those of the named plaintiffs: "Academic authors, almost by definition, are committed to maximizing access to knowledge. [emphasis added]. The [Authors] Guild and the [Association of American Publishers], by contrast, are institutionally committed to maximizing profits."" (p. 28-29, quoting Samuelson). Comment: hear, hear!! Kudos and thanks to the academic authors and authors groups who took the time to express objections.

Several other flaws in the settlement suggest that turning down the Settlement is a victory for democracy as well. The settlement is described as "an attempt to use the class action mechanism to implement forward-looking business arrangements that go far beyond the dispute before the Court in this litigation." (p. 21). Antitrust concerns (an effective Google monopoly on orphan works) are cited as well. The Settlement brings in involuntary participants, including owners of copyright in orphan works and foreign works; the objections of foreign nations are noted. As the Settlement notes, issues about copyright should be addressed by Congress, not through this approach.

For the future, let's hope that fairer and more appropriate approaches to copyright, including limiting terms (can we go back to 14 years, renewable once please?) and addressing orphan works is brought up in legislatures and international copyright venues, soon.

As for publishers and authors of works that are IN copyright, instead of suing people, why not focus on getting these works digitized and available through attractive business models such as free online / pay for print on demand?

For other works of mine of this topic, see:

• my presentation Open Content Alliance (OCA) vs. Google Books: OCA as superior network and better fit for an emerging global public sphere
• Google Books settlement: open access to my book chapters, please
• Will Google survive Google Books? Reflections from a Friend.

Postscript: THANKS to Google and participating libraries for pushing the envelope. Clearly, more work is needed, but progress to date is already showing the potential and articulating some of the challenges still to be overcome.

Open thesis: draft introduction

The first draft of the introduction to my thesis is now available and posted online as part of my commitment to an open thesis approach. Comments (moderated) are welcome and will be gathered on my SFU website. For now, the commenting function there does not appear to be working, so please e-mail me at hgmorris at sfu dot ca. I will assume any comments are for public posting unless notified otherwise. Many thanks to my senior supervisor Rick Gruneau for working with me on this experiment.

Assessing new open access journals

One question that often comes up as we transition to open access publishing is how to assess new open access journals. How do we know that these are legitimate? Here is my answer, informed and inspired by conversation on the SCHOLCOMM listserv, and reflecting my own perspective.

THE KEY QUESTION for assessing the quality of any academic journal, is whether the journal is the communication vehicle for a group of serious scholars committed to appropriate quality control such as peer review.

SOME APPROACHES TO ANSWERING THIS KEY QUESTION:

• If you have received a solicitation to participate in an academic journal, who did this come from? A colleague that you know and trust? A leader in your field? Or someone you have never heard of?
• Who edits the journal? Again, people you know, leaders in your field? In the case of a new publisher that you heard about from someone who don't know, it is a good practice to double check with people whose names are listed as being on the editorial advisory board, as there have been instances of new publishers listing people without their knowledge or permission. Note that if the journal is legitimate, the editorial board member will appreciate your interest in the journal.
• Are the peer review guidelines posted on the website? If so, are they appropriate for this discipline?
• If the journal has already published some issues, what is the quality of the work included?
• Who publishes this journal? What is their mandate and reputation? There are many not-for-profits involved in publishing, including university presses, university libraries, and scholarly societies. The not-for-profit mandate is not a guarantor of quality, but it is a strong indication that the primary motive is scholarship rather than profit. Reputation is another important indicator. A number of open access publishers, both not-for-profit and for-profit, have earned a reputation for quality publishing, including Public Library of Science, BioMedCentral, and Hindawi, among others. A new commercial outfit may well be aiming for top quality, but it will (and should) have its work cut out for it to establish a reputation for quality.
• An indirect measure of reputation is membership in the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA), as OASPA vets members on these quality questions. Note that there is a waiting list of prospective members.
• Another indirect measure is inclusion of the journal in the Directory of Open Access Journals as DOAJ has a quality control vetting process.

OTHER FACTORS TO CONSIDER

• Does the journal use CC licensing? Preferably one of the strong CC licenses for open access, including CC-BY, CC-BY-NC, or CC-BY-SA.
• Is the journal fully open access?
• Is the journal firmly committed to open access?
• Asking about participation in OASPA and/or DOAJ may help nudge journals to consider these options. For some, the vetting process may help them to develop best practices in quality control.

NEW JOURNALS will not be included in DOAJ, and new publishers will not be listed in OASPA. In these situations, it is best to rely on the academic community involved in the journal as the best indicator of quality.

Caroline Sutton, President of the Open Access Scholarly Publishers' Association (OASPA) notes that she frequently gets questions about whether new publishers should be considered trustworthy, and her answer is whether the publisher supports what she articulates as the core values of open access publishers - for details, see her presentation at ALA Midwinter 2011 - towards the end of the presentation.

Thanks to Jean Amaral, Sandy Thatcher, Hope Leman, and Peter Suber for contributions to the SCHOLCOMM discussion that inspired this post.

References (added November 15, 2011 - thanks to Nicole Gjertsen).

Beall, J. Predatory Open Access Scholarly Publishers. The Charleston Advisor 11: 4, April 2010 10-17.

Beall, J. Update: Predatory Open Access Scholarly Publishers. The Charleston Advisor 12:1, July 2010 , pp. 50-50.

Updated March 29, 2011 (included link to Caroline Sutton's presentation).

The path to peace is through hearts and minds

Proposal for round table on The University in Crisis: Tradition, innovation, and employment in Communications departments, Emerging Scholars Network, International Association of Media Communication Researchers (IAMCR) 2011 conference

The purpose of this presentation is to explore options for humanities & social sciences in general, and communication in particular, to advocate for support and growth by articulating our value to the world. What counts is not always what can be counted. In a post-9/11 world, where our emphasis seems to increasingly be narrowing on science, technology, and commerce, we (humankind) should be asking ourselves whether the road to lasting peace could ever come through science & technology, or whether this is a matter of hearts and minds. To avoid the immanent catastrophe of global warming requires nothing less than a global change in behavior. Fixing a global financial system that is prone to the kind of crisis we saw in 2008 will take some creative thinking, not only about economics, but politics, too. The arts and culture are among the very best of what we humans do; they make life worthwhile. My thesis is that it is worthwhile for some of us scholars to spend some time analyzing and explaining why it is that humanities and social sciences in general, and communication studies in particular, matter, because when we do, our societies will soon understand the importance of supporting our work. I will draw on theories of rationalization and commodification (e.g. Weber, Marx, Lukacs) and alternatives, including values rationality (Weber), the commons (e.g. Lessig, Boyle, Ostrom), and transnational advocacy networks (Keck and Sikkink). I will further draw on my background as an open access advocate to provide some examples of how to effectively advocate in this area, and explain why providing open access to our own scholarly work can help us make the case.

Proposal submitted March 5, 2011. I am posting the proposal on submission because the work of advocating for humanities and social sciences is urgent.

Illustrating of the potential for savings with a global shift to open access

This chart, Global library cost comparison with OA options, illustrates the potential for cost savings with a full flip to open access if we look for efficiencies along the way.

On the left, we see the $8 billion U.S. in revenue from journals received by the scholarly publishing industry. Of this, about $5.6 billion is revenue from academic library subscriptions. Compare this to the $2.5 billion it would cost to publish every one of the world's estimated 1.5 million scholarly articles produced annually on a worldwide basis at the BioMedCentral standard fee of $1,680, for a total of $2.5 billion. This would be full global open access to scholarly articles at less than half of what academic libraries are contributing to the system now. The savings would be even greater at average PLoS ONE fee of $1,350. On the right hand side, we see what would if happen the current $188 average per-article revenue for journals using OJS were to apply across the board, the global total of $.2 billion would be a tiny fraction of the current spend - less than 3%.

The next chart, Comparison of per-article revenue, illustrates what to me is a central point is considering the economics of transition to open access, that is: as we shift the economics from purchase to production, the cost per article is critical in determining the feasibility and sustainability of the system. On the left, we see the average per-article revenue received in the current system of over $5,000. This is compared with the BioMedCentral standard article processing fee and PLoS ONE, about a third of the current per-article revenue. Since both BMC and PLoS ONE are doing well financially, this illustrates that high quality publishing is possible at less than a third of the present revenue. On the right hand side, we see the average revenue for an OJS journal of $188, illustrating that the traditional scholarly gift economy can manage essentially the same work for about 3 percent of the current average revenue.

These numbers are meant to be suggestive only, one guideline to consider in the transition to open access.

Recommendations
If the goal is an affordable open access scholarly publishing system, it makes sense to support scholar-publishers of the type included in the OJS survey, and it makes sense to support cost-effective charges like the BMC standard and PLoS ONE.

Sources
The $8 billion U.S. annually for scholarly journals revenue is from the Research Information Network (2008)Activities, costs and funding flows in the scholarly communications system in the UK, retrieved from http://is.gd/3Q7cm as cited in the STM report. 2009. International Association of Scientific, Technical and Medical Publishers (STM). Retrieved from: http://www.stm-assoc.org/

Global annual scholarly peer-reviewed articles is estimated at 1.5 million per year, as reported by Björk et al, Global annual volume of peer reviewed scholarly articles and the share available via different open access options, ELPUB 2008, retrieved from http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/~elpub2008/presentations.html

The PLoS ONE and BMC article processing fees are from the respective websites as of March 1, 2011.

The $188 average revenue per OJS journal is from a survey by Edgar, Brian & John Willinsky. A Survey of the Scholarly Journals Using Open Journal Systems. 2011. In press. Retrieved from http://pkp.sfu.ca/node/2773

This post is an update and elaboration of earlier charts I developed for IJPE and various presentations.

Typo correction March 5: number of peer-reviewed articles per year is 1.5 million, not 1.5 billion. Thanks to Douglas Carnall for spotting the error.

Tetrahedron article processing fee: overpriced. very.

This post is from a Liblicense message and forms part of a February 2011 discussion revolving around Tetrahedron and Harvard's open access fund.

One point that I have not yet seen in this discussion: is Tetrahedron's article processing fee overpriced? I would argue yes, very.

If Tetrahedron is charging $3,000 per article, while the American Physical Society is charging $1,500 for their new OA journal Physical Review X, and Nature is charging $1,350 for their forthcoming OA journal Scientific Reports, and both Springer and Wiley have announced competitive lower prices on their new OA journal suites (compared to their hybrid journal prices), then perhaps Tetrahedron has priced themselves out of the emerging OA market - which in the long run does not bode well either for Tetrahedron or its publisher.

I would recommend that Harvard researchers take advantage of the opportunity to self-archive Tetrahedron articles in DASH, and NOT consider paying the Tetrahedron APF, on the grounds that the cost is excessive.

To speculate a little: is it possible that this trend toward more affordable article processing fees is an early indication of the success of COPE (Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity)? Restricting COPE funding to fully OA journals appears (to me) to be helping to inspire the creation of new affordable OA journals. In the long run, this is what will create the new, affordable OA system of which Darnton speaks.

Some of the present players in the scholarly publishing system are obviously leading in the transition, while (not too surprisingly) some may be lagging behind.

Core Values of Librarianship

Thanks to the American Library Association for articulating these 11 Core Values of Librarianship. I'm repeating the full list here - for convenience as I've had trouble finding these on the ALA website before - and also because they are worth repeating. This is what librarianship is all about!

The foundation of modern librarianship rests on an essential set of core values, which define, inform, and guide all professional practice. These values reflect the history and ongoing development of the profession and have been advanced, expanded, and refined by numerous policy statements of the American Library Association. Among these are:

• Access
• Confidentiality/Privacy
• Democracy
• Diversity
• Education and Lifelong Learning
• Intellectual Freedom
• Preservation
• The Public Good
• Professionalism
• Service
• Social Responsibility

It would be difficult, if not impossible, to express our values more eloquently than ALA already has in the Freedom to Read statement, the Library Bill of Rights, the ALA Mission Statement, Libraries: an American Value and other documents. These policies have been carefully thought out, articulated, debated, and approved by the ALA Council. They are interpreted, revised, or expanded when necessary. Over time, the values embodied in these statements have been embraced by the majority of librarians as the foundations of their practice. Adopted, 2004.

Thanks to Al Kagan for the pointer.

Bill C-32 (Canada's copyright reform act) - response from an open access advocate

This is a copy of my response to the consultation on Bill C-32, Canada's copyright reform act. Details and links to other responses can be found on Michael Geist's blog. Comments are due by January 31.

Speaking as a scholarly author/creator, student, teacher, and librarian, here are my comments on what I see as the most critical aspects to consider with Bill C-32.

DIGITAL LOCKS AND PROTECTION OF DIGITAL LOCKS SHOULD BE LIMITED TO PREVENTING ILLEGAL USE OF MATERIAL

As Bill C-32 stands, circumvention of digital locks would be illegal, even if the use of the material is perfectly legal (e.g., private copying, making works accessible to the print disabled). This is a deeply troubling provision. There is no protection at all for authors such as myself who share our work freely on the Internet. What is to stop someone from putting a lock in between my work and those who would like to read it? My point is that if there are to be any provisions regarding digital locks, these should limit placing locks which circumvent legal use. If anyone places a lock on work that I have made freely available, the law should protect my right to share, and my reader's right to have the lock removed.

Facilitating legal use should be REQUIRED, not just permitted. Selling digitally locked down materials that effectively prevent use by the print disabled is a practice that deserves to be outlawed, not protected!

FAIR DEALING FOR EDUCATIONAL PURPOSES JUST MAKES SENSE

Canada is far behind other countries such as the U.S. when it comes to sharing material for educational purposes. Canada's educational systems spend a great deal of money on materials covered by copyright, and this will not change with expanded fair dealing. It is in the best interests of creators to support education; without basic literacy, for example, there would be little need for written material of any kind.

COPYRIGHT LAW SHOULD RECOGNIZE AND SUPPORT THE EXPANDING NUMBERS OF CREATORS WHO PREFER TO SHARE WORKS FREELY
As a typical scholarly author, I write works in order to contribute to advancing the world's knowledge, and the ideal for me is to share my works freely, for example through my institutional repository:
http://ir.lib.sfu.ca/handle/1892/79/items-by-author?author=Morrison%2C+Heather
and my scholarly blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics:
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

Like many in today's society, I have contributed Creative Commons licensed photos for free sharing to flickr, and occasionally participate in free collaborative services such as the Open Access Directory and Wikipedia.

As a prolific author / creator, what I would like to see is:

• a guarantee that works which I have made freely available will remain freely available
• elimination of automatic copyright (no copyright without registration)
• elimination of Crown Copyright; replace this with a requirement for open access to government-funded work
• shorter copyright periods, e.g. 14 years with one extension (and this not automatic)
• make it possible to place work directly into the public domain
  

Many thanks for the opportunity to participate. I will post a copy of this response to my blog, The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

best,

Heather G. Morrison
Doctoral Candidate
Simon Fraser University School of Communication
http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/
hgmorris at sfu dot ca

Access Copyright Insanity - Possible Solutions?

Access Copyright, Canada's copyright collective, is asking for an absolutely ludicrous tariff increase (about a tenfold increase from about $3.5 to $35 per post-secondary student), at the same time that they are looking for increased restrictions (no linking please!) and paperwork (e.g. having students sign a form saying that they are in fact a student, and using the work for their studies). This is all on top of libraries paying top dollar for the content, by the way.

Some possible solutions that libraries might want to consider:

• Ask Access Copyright for a complete list of members / works covered. Don't buy any of their stuff. Who doesn't have way too much to read as it is? Besides, this will filter out anyone so out of touch that they think forbidding hyperlinking on the internet makes sense.
  
• If you MUST buy their stuff, set up a separate site on your website for this material, appropriately labelled - perhaps with an icon including a hefty lock and chain and/or wording to the effect, USE THIS LOCKED DOWN MATERIAL AT YOUR OWN LEGAL PERIL.
• Send Access Copyright a bill for about 10 times what they think you should pay them. This actually does make sense for a university library; think of how many faculty and students are creators, particularly of works in the academic library. Why are WE paying THEM at all, anyway?

Another thought: if Access Copyright members have issues with people reading and citing their work, what will this do to the Open Access Citation Impact Advantage? My prediction is that this will increase the difference.

On the plus side, we should all be grateful to Access Copyright for demands that so obviously show the lunacy of lock-down in academia that faculty members are now flocking to solutions such as Open Educational Resources.

Nature Publishing Group and Scientific Reports: getting serious about OA competition

Kudos to Nature Publishing Group on their announcement of their forthcoming open access publication Scientific Reports. Priced at $1,350 US per accepted manuscript and using Creative Commons licensing shows that Nature is finally getting serious about competing in the open access arena. Also of significance is that Nature is providing ethical leadership in this area by contributing support to Creative Commons in the form of $20 per article, as well as supporting broader author's rights than many OA publications by offering two CC license options.

This can be seen as a qualitative sign of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access, as it is clear that the commercial sector is seeing the growth and deciding that open access is where the market is likely to be going. In my opinion, this is also a harbinger of future OA growth, as the reasonable article processing fee is likely to attract greater uptake than many earlier OA experiments by traditional publishers. This is also a welcome sign that some of the traditional quality publishers are likely to have the flexibility to transition to and thrive in the open access environment.

Welcome to Nature's Scientific Reports! Nature is not on the list of Open Access Scholarly Publishing Association (OASPA) members - at least, not yet! Perhaps they are on the waiting list mentioned by OASPA President Caroline Sutton at the ACRL SPARC Forum at ALA Midwinter this weekend?

Hindawi's 40% growth in submissions in 2010

Paul Peters of Hindawi reports that Hindawi exceeded 3,000 monthly submissions for the first time in December 2010, up from reaching 2,000 monthly submissions for the first time in August 2010. Overall, growth in submissions for Hindawi was 40% in 2010.

Congratulations to Hindawi for yet another indication of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access!

PLoS ONE: now the world's largest journal?

This post explores data strongly suggesting that open access journal PLoS ONE is now the world's largest journal. According to Pete Binfield (personal correspondence), in 2010 PLoS One published 6,749 articles. Based on listserv discussions in 2008, the world's largest journals at that date were PHYS REV B (5782 articles) and APPL PHYS LETT (5449 articles). As of today, a search for 2010 articles at the APS website yields 6,206 articles. A search for 2010 articles for APPL PHYS LETT in IEEE's xPLore service yields 4,381 articles.

So it is timely to raise the question: is the world's largest scholarly journal now an open access journal, PLoS One? If anyone has data that can help to illuminate this issue, please join the conversation started by Daniel Mietchen at Friend Feed, or send me an e-mail at hgmorris at sfu dot ca.

Update January 21, 2012: since this post was written, in 2011 PLoS ONE growth doubled, to just under 14,000 articles published in 2011 alone. Details and chart available in the December 31, 2012 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access. 

Methodology Note: this post is an informal brief research project, based on consultation with library and publisher experts on the size of the world's largest journals, presented for informal peer collaboration and academic critique. It is also an update of this post from 2009 projecting PLoS ONE as the world's largest journal in 2010. The number of articles published in 2010 in PLoS ONE is less than projected, but still apparently more than enough to make PLoS ONE the world's largest research journal. This post forms part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access

2010 was the strongest year for open access growth so far. In 2010, 1,401 journals were added to DOAJ for a total of 5,936 journals. The Electronic Journals Library now records over 27,000 journals that can be read free of charge; over 3,500 were added in 2010. 1,037 journals actively participate in PubMedCentral, an increase of 313 over the past year, and more than half of these journals contribute all articles as open access. PMC now provides access to over 3.2 million free articles, an increase of over 300,000 this year. OpenDOAR lists 1,817 repositories, having added 257 this year. A Scientific Commons search encompasses 38 million items, an increase of over 6 million since last year. There are 261 open access mandate policies, an increase of 83 this year.

Open access mandate policies showed the strongest growth in percentage terms, with a 90% increase in thesis mandates and a 61% increase in departmental mandates, 47% growth in total mandates, and 41% growth in institutional mandates. For links to full details and charts on OA mandate growth, see this post by Alma Swan. A total of 7 measures showed growth of 40% or better, including DOAJ's journals and articles searchable at article level. 7 measures showed growth of 30% or better, including the number of journals in PMC with immediate free access (37%) and the number of journals in PMC with all articles open access (34%), the number of peer-reviewed journals included in Open J-Gate (36%), and the total number of journals included in Open J-Gate (31%), the number of repositories listed in ROAR (34%), and the number of proposed open access mandates (33%). A further 11 measures were 10% or better, including BASE content providers, RePEC (both total items and items available online), and the number of documents in E-LIS and arXiv.

New this issue: historical data has been added to the full data edition (see the DGOA Dataverse to download), thanks to Tim Gray of Homerton College Library) and the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. The show growth issue focuses on 2010 growth, and includes columns for average daily, weekly, and monthly growth for illustration purposes. New additions include Mendeley and the open data journal policies list at the Open Access Directory (the latter as a first foray into tracking the dramatic growth of open data). A first edition of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access Rationale and Methodology is now available for download from the DGOA Dataverse or for viewing as a Google Doc. For full data that is downloadable as the Dec 31 2010 full data edition or the Dec 31 2010 show growth edition, see the DGOA Dataverse at Harvard; for quick web viewing of the latest data, see the Google Docs Show Growth version. For links to all versions and commentary, see the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

This post was updated Jan. 1, 2010, adding links to Alma Swan's post and the services listed below, and on Jan. 2, 2010, adding links to the Polish version created by E-LIS Editor Bożena Bednarek-Michalska, which can be found here and here. Updated again Jan. 4, adding this link to MIT stats showing the popularity of open educational resources.

A Happy New Year to everyone in the open access movement!

The numbers: open access status and growth in 2010

DOAJ (peer-reviewed, active, open access journals)

• 5,936 journals (1,401 journals added in 2010, growth rate 4 titles per day) 31% growth
  
• 2,494 journals searchable at article level (735 added in 2010, growth rate 2 per day) 42% growth
  
• 490,411 articles searchable at article level (154,912 added in 2010, growth rate 424 per day) 46% growth
  

Open J-Gate

• 8,105 journals (1,907 added in 2010, growth rate 5 titles per day) 31% growth
  
• 4,877 peer-reviewed journals (1,297 added in 2010, growth rate 3.5 titles per day) 36% growth
  

Electronic Journals Library (journals that can be read free of charge)

• 27,030 journals (3,591 added in 2010, growth rate 10 titles per day) 15% growth

Open Journal Systems Journals: 7,500 (about 1,500 growth in 2010)

PubMedCentral Journals

• 1,037 journals actively participating (313 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 title per day) 43% growth
  
• 622 journals provide immediate free access (169 more than a year ago) 37% growth
  
• 532 journals provide OA to all articles (136 more than a year ago) 34% growth
  

PubMedCentral Articles

• 3.2 million articles (314,422 added in 2010) (see PMC Free tab) (11% growth)
  
• CIHR-funded articles freely available: 4,464 (new to DGOA)
  
• Wellcome Trust funded articles freely available: 27,572 (new to DGOA)
  

OpenDOAR (vetted list of repositories)

• 1,817 repositories (259 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 repository per day) 17% growth

Registry of Open Access Repositories

• 2,090 repositories (533 added in 2010, growth rate about 2 repositories per day) 34% growth
  

BASE (Bielefeld Academic Search Engine)

• 25.5 million documents (3.5 million added in 2010, growth rate about 10,000 per day) 16% growth
  
• 1,727 content providers (323 added in 2010, growth rate about 1 repository per day) 23% growth
  
• IS BASE's number counter broken? The numbers have not changed this quarter

Scientific Commons

• 38 million publications (6 million added in 2010, growth rate about 16,000 per day) 19% growth
  
• 1,269 repositories (111 added in 2010) 10% growth
  
• IS Scientific Commons' number counter broken? The numbers have not changed this quarter

arXiv

• 650,000 thousand documents (70,092 added in 2010, growth rate about 200 per day) 12% growth
  

RePEc

• 860,000 fulltext online (160,000 added in 2010, growth rate over 400 per day) 23% growth
  

E-LIS

• 11,420 documents (1,308 added in 2010, growth rate 3.5 documents per day) 13% growth
  

Mendeley

• 56 million metadata records; 297,189 articles freely available (new to DGOA)
  

Open Access Mandate Policies (from ROARMAP)

• Departmental: 29 (11 added in 2010) 61% growth
  
• Funder: 46 (4 added in 2010) 10% growth
  
• Institutional: 111 (36 added in 2010) 41% growth
  
• Multi-institutional: 1 (1 added in 2010)
  
• Thesis: 74 (35 added in 2010) 90% growth
  
• Total: 261 (83 added in 2010) 47% growth
• Proposed mandates: 20 (up 5 from 2010) 33% growth
  

Open Data Policies: 14 (new to DGOA) (from Open Access Directory journals with open data policies, proposed list)

Highwire Free

• 2.1 million free articles (161,030 added in 2010) 8% growth
• 47 completely free sites (1 added in 2010) 2% growth
• 284 sites with free back issues (1 added in 2010) less than 1% growth

WANTED: macro-level metrics for open data

The open data movement is closely related to the open access movement, and of great interest and use to scholars. It is obvious that there is a lot happening; currently one of my best sources of information is Tracey Lauriault of civicaccess.ca and datalibre.ca fame. As an aside, it is a little ironic that data phenomenon / statistician Tracey is the source par excellence for qualitative information on this matter, whilst I, the critical scholar rather inclined to look with scepticism at purely quantitative research, am apparently the volunteer keeper of the quarterly statistics for the open access movement. Glen Newton points to the 70 online databases that define our planet, from Technology Review, the arXiv physics blog, as further qualitative evidence that there is a lot of quantitative data out there already.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.

Dramatic Growth of Open Access brief update: chart showing gold growth

Revised and updated Dec. 23, 2010

This chart by Peter Hendrik, President, Springer STM Publishing, from Hendrik's presentation at the 2010 Berlin Open Access Conference in Beijing, (based on information from Thompson-Reuters) predicting possible OA article growth at 20% compared to total article growth of 3.5% by 2020 is well worth noting.

Why is this worth noting? Interesting as this projection is per se, the reason that this is important is because it reflects two players very much from the commercial traditional subscription journal market predicting stronger growth of open access articles than overall article growth. The two players are Springer and Thompson-Reuters. Such predictions are not new, of course; I have been making similar predictions for years. So what is new is not the prediction, but who is making the prediction. To the best of my knowledge, this is new; but if I am wrong, please correct me.

Other interesting aspects of Hendrik's presentation: the fact that a senior Springer Executive is presenting at an open access conference, highlighting what Springer has to offer in this area; a chart showing hybrid OA update by disciplines (not surprisingly, biology and medicine show higher update); a slide on price adjustments for hybrid journals (no figures - if anyone has figures, let me know); a slide (# 13) on gold OA growth - selected details:

From Hendrik's slide 13 - 'Gold' Open Access is growing fast

• approx. 4% of ISI-indexed articles in 2009 are gold OA
• BMC - 18,000 articles in 2009; 21% growth
• PLoS - 6,000 articles in 2009, 50% growth
• Hindawi - 4,000 articles in 2009, 75% growth
  

Many thanks to Hendrik for this presentation, and to A. Ben Wagner for pointing to the citation. This originally came to my attention through Stevan Harnad at the American Scientist Open Access Forum, who posted the chart linked to above in order to critique it. Harnad has posted to the effect that he thinks my brief interpretation of the chart he posted (i.e. much higher OA article growth than total article growth predicted) is full of errors. My perspective on this is that Harnad is missing the forest (the fact that it is now traditional commercial subscription publishers seeing and predicting strong open access, an excellent omen for future OA growth - if these folks are seeing the potential of OA, they have the ability to push it further forward and the incentive to do so) for the trees (the details of the numbers - from my point of view, this is forecasting and I have no concern with whether the forecast is correct or not. My perspective is that there is sufficient open access out there - archives, journals publishers - to prove the concept. The Springers of the world may need to forecast due to their commercial nature, but for most of us this is not necessary - what we need to do is not to forecast, but rather to adopt and implement strong open access policy, infrastructure for OA publishing and archives, and shift the economics to OA, to make it happen).

Libraries: is this YOUR free cash? informa (Taylor & Francis) glowing picture for investors

While libraries are reeling from severe budget cuts due to the financial crisis, how are the commercial publishers that rely on us doing? Hurting too? Not really, it seems. Here is what informa (Taylor & Francis) is telling investors today:

The strong portfolio of products within the Informa stable allows the group highly favourable valuation characteristics including:

* Excellent free cash generation
* High return on capital employed
* Excellent quality of earnings - significant subscription revenues with high renewal rates
* High margins especially on data and subscription products
* High operational gearing and cost flexibility
* Products which do and will continue to benefit from technological advances and changing consumer trends

From: informa / Investor Relations

What does this mean?

Excellent free cash generation = when we send in our subscription payments, they have tons of cash on hand. In ordinary household terms: when you get your paycheque, the money is not all going to pay the bills right away, you pay these off and have lots of spending money.

High return on capital employed = for what they spend on getting the journals, they get way more money back.

High margins especially on data and subscription revenues with high renewal rates = high profits. Does it mean that they could afford to give your library a MUCH bigger discount - say 30 to 40 % more - and still more than cover their costs? Yes, it does. I don't have enough detail to specify the amount, but this does seem reasonable to ask.

High operational gearing and cost flexibility = even though they are making way more than it costs to produce the journals, they are finding ways to cut corners and make even more profits. If they are passing on some of the savings to your library, please let me know!

Products which do and will continue to benefit from technological advances and changing consumer trends = they think no matter what happens, they will just keep on making more and more money.

This post is part of the economics 101 series.

Dramatic Growth honoured by Intech's Katarina Lovrecic

The Dec. 11, 2010 Dramatic Growth of Open Access has been highlighted in Katarina Lovrecic's End of the year open access highlights. Well worth a read - thanks, Katarina!

Dramatic Growth of Open Access Dec. 11, 2010 comment and reply

Revised Dec. 17, 2010 - comment on renaissance of the scholar / publisher from Willinsky & Edgar added.

Phil Davis on the Scholarly Kitchen has posted the comment, For Open Access Journals, the Size does Matter, as a comment on my Dec. 11, 2010 early year-end edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Comment

In brief

The growth of open access is particularly amazing given how little economic support has been made available so far. The economic target that I would suggest is high-quality, fully open access publishing that is economically sustainable or cost-effective. The number of open access journal titles is an indirect indication of the growth of open access publishing per se, which would ideally be measured by the number of articles published open access. As the DOAJ search by article service grows, this measure may become more feasible over time. Nevertheless, the number of titles per se is important as an indication of OA infrastructure, that is, the ability of open access to grow rapidly, given a little support. Behind the many fairly new, relatively small journals listed in DOAJ is a substantial new publishing system which can support many more titles; and small journals with relatively few articles could easily grow with even a little redirection of funding. These are just a few of the reasons why it makes a lot of sense for libraries to join the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity. Online-only, open access journals are not the same as print or subscription-based journals, and so it does not make sense to apply the same measures to assess the success of these journals - for example, the need to bundle a certain amount of articles for a print artefact, or to justify subscriptions has implications for the number of articles needed for a successful print and/or subscription-based journal that does not necessarily apply to an online open access journal. Willinsky & Edgar, reporting on a major survey of journals using OJS, describe the current situation as a renaissance of the scholar publisher.

Details

This is a welcome discussion of this important topic. Phil's main point seems to be that OA publishing is not yet a clear-cut success, particularly from an economic viewpoint. I would agree with this point. What is amazing to me is how much OA has grown with so little funding made available. To create further growth and to transition scholarly communication as a whole to open access, what libraries need to do is to transition funding to OA support. A good first step, one that does not require tough budgetary decisions, is simply joining the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity - highly recommended as an OA New Year's Resolution.

Phil's first question, with respect to the dramatic growth of DOAJ is: "But does this type of growth really indicate economic success in open access publishing?". My comment: there is an assumption in this question, that the purpose of open access is economic success. From my perspective, this is worth querying. Why success rather than sustainability or cost-effectiveness? What kind of success is Phil looking for? High profits? Why not fully open access, high quality publishing at sustainable or cost-effective rates? - this is what I recommend.

Phil goes on to cover an article in First Monday by Frantsvåg which takes issue with the size of publishers in DOAJ, noting that most (90%) are publishers of single journals. One of Frantsvåg's key points is that small publishers lack economies of scale. From an economic perspective, I would first like to note that due to an inelastic market, mega-publishers with large portfolios of journals and fat profit margins are part of the problem, not part of the solution (a topic I deal with at length in my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians, unfortunately not OA).

Next, I would like to point out that small publishing is typical of scholarly publishers, as Raym Crow points out in his paper on Publishing Cooperatives, downloadable from the SPARC Papers and Guides website. The dramatic growth of open access journals may reflect a renewal of scholarly leadership in this area. Publishing cooperatives is one of the solutions to creating economies of scale for smaller publishers.

Also, with modern publishing software, such as the free, open source Open Journal Systems, it is quite feasible for a single scholarly journal to manage on its own with modest support services provided by a university library or service such as Scholarly Exchange.

Another important point is that the early proliferation of many small publishing outfits likely reflects the growth in publishing support services, particularly new scholarly publishing services at university libraries. That is, behind a great many of these small publishers stands a very new publishing service representing a significant infrastructure ready to take off - just one of the reasons that I very much look forward to future editions of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access.

Edgar and Willinsky describe the flourishing growth of journals using OJS (over 7,500 journals worldwide) as a renaissance of the scholar publisher, in their report of a major survey of OJS journals.

Excerpt:
"In marked contrast to the findings of other studies, only 6 percent of these journals are
published by commercial houses, compared to the 64 percent reported by Ware and Mabe (2009) and Crow (2005). Scholarly societies published 32 percent of the titles in this sample, exceeding the 23 percent that Crow found scholarly societies “self-publishing” in his study of journals as a whole (with societies having turned over 17 percent of the journals being published to commercial publishers to publish on the society’s behalf). This leaves the vast majority of the journals in this sample as published or sponsored by an academic department (51 percent), a non-profit publisher (16 percent), research unit (10 percent) and independent group (10 percent), although these percentages cannot be added up, as respondents could choose more than one sponsor (Table 2). As well, it needs to be allowed that commercially published journals would be less likely to complete such a survey, given a noted reluctance among this constituency to share information about publishing practices (Houghton et al., 2009). Still, these results suggest that the majority of these journals fall into what can be identified as the independent or scholar-publisher titles." AND "Yet this sample also stands apart from the majority of journals. Where a small number of large commercial publishers now dominate journal publishing (Crow, 2005), this study found that commercial entities formed the smallest category of publisher. The scholar-publisher – or more accurately the group-of-scholars-as-publisher – is responsible for the majority of journals in this study, constituting a type that dates back to the earliest days of the journal, when Henry Oldenburg launched the Philosophical Transactions as an independent, albeit commercial, venture. The scholarpublisher is now experiencing, this study suggests, a certain renaissance, facilitated by online, open access."

Phil goes on to comment on an article by Walters forthcoming in College and Research Libraries, Characteristics of Open Access Journals in Six Subject Areas. Walters notes the wide variety in open access journals in publishers, with one journal publishing more than 2,700 articles in a year, while many others publish less than 25 articles per year.

Phil seems to think that journals must be of a certain size to be successful. With electronic-only, online open access publishing, I would challenge this view. A print-based journal needs to have a certain quantity of articles for regular mailings to make sense; generally somewhat the same quantity for consistency. This is not the case with online journals at all; there is no a priori reason why an online journal needs to have a particular number of articles to be a success.

One of Phil's points, that the growth of gold OA is better measured by articles than by journal titles, is something that I very much agree with (and the reason I always include the number of articles available through a DOAJ search). On the other hand, the number of journal titles is an important indication of infrastructure for OA. That is to say - if there are many OA journals that are currently publishing relatively few articles, it is highly likely that these journals could easily accomodate tremendous growth in demand for OA publishing - particularly if this transition were accompanied by a redirection of funding from subscriptions to open access. This is an indication of readiness for further growth, which is important to know!

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: December 11, 2010 early year-end edition

In brief: the Directory of Open Access Journals now lists 5,864 titles, having added more than 1,300 over the past year, or close to 4 titles per day (a growing growth rate!). OA is growing fast in the medical area; more than half the research funded by NIH indexed in PubMed is now freely available, regardless of publication. The number of journals actively participating in PubMedCentral is growing - now over 1,000 titles; over half provide OA to all articles, and nearly 60% provide immediate free access. Percentage-wise, OA mandates continue to lead in growth, with a total of 24 mandates added to ROARMAP this quarter, with the eprints OA Week Mandate Challenge a likely contributing factor. This fall's OA Week was the biggest ever. A unique OA milestone this quarter was Jan Szczepanski's personal OA title collection exceeding 10,000 titles. Looking forward to 2011 and beyond, clearly this is just the beginning! Suggested OA New Years' Resolutions: adopt and implement an open access mandate policy, join the Compact on Open Access Publishing Equity (COPE) or the Open Access Scholarly Publishers Association (OASPA) or both - or just keep up the good work and know that the small efforts the many thousands of us are making are adding up to all the difference in the world.

Downloadable data is available at the DGOA Dataverse, or go to Google Docs to view the full data edition, or the show growth edition which highlights quarterly and annual growth. Previous editions of Dramatic Growth can be found here.


Details

Selected numbers

DOAJ: 5,864 titles
412 added this quarter (nearly 6 per day!)
1,374 added this year (about 4 per day)
2,435 journals searchable at article level
485,034 articles searchable at article level

Open J-Gate (portal to english-language OA journals): 7,921 titles (1,796 added this year
of these, 4,721 are peer reviewed (1,211 added this year)

PubMedCentral:
1,009 journals actively participating (49 added this quarter)
596 journals with immediate free access (40 added this quarter)
515 journals will all articles open access (35 added this quarter)

# of repositories:
OpenDOAR: 1,815 (78 added this quarter)
Registry of Open Access Repositories: 2,049 (180 added this quarter)

# of documents in repositories: ?? Normally, I rely on totals at the meta-search engines for repositories. This quarter, Scientific Commons shows no difference from the previous quarter, while the Bielefed Academic Search Engine is down one service provide, and up less than a thousand documents. This makes no sense at all - RePEC alone added 35,000 documents. OAIster has noted an increase of 2 million documents since the last report (some time ago), up to 25 million. Does anyone know what is happening with the meta search tools? Maintenance perhaps? If so, a quick note on the website for the benefit of those of us looking at the numbers would be helpful.

Open Journal Systems: 7,500 journals are using OJS.

Why am I optimistic that this is just the beginning? Thanks to many conversations with librarians (and publishers) at library and academic conferences this year, I know that there are a great many activists in scholarly, library, and publishing circle, working hard to make open access happen and how to transition the system as a whole, to make it easier to make OA happen. Because of my work co-coordinating the ARL ACRL Institute on Scholarly Communication webinar series this year, I know that there are many people in libraries across North America that have already developed significant expertise in this area, others are working to get up to speed, and many libraries are in the process of moving from a step-by-step to a comprehensive programming approach to open access.

Update December 15, 2010: in case it is not obvious, the charts in this post are all mine, created from data that I have collected over the years. Please feel free to re-use the charts according to the IJPE CC-BY-NC-SA license - but be sure to attribute me and IJPE! ~ Heather Morrison

Dramatic Growth of Open Access: brief update

Noteworthy in October: Open Access Week extends its reach with broader participation than ever before, as noted by SPARC's Heather Joseph and Jennifer McLennan, with one of the results being the most prolific month ever (to date) for open access mandates as recorded by Peter Suber in the November 2010 SPARC Open Access Newsletter.

Results of the Open Access Week Mandate Challenge, thanks to Les Carr on OASIS: During the Challenge, 14 new mandates were adopted. Of these, 7 wereinstitutional, 3 were departmental and 3 were mandates on theses. In addition, one was a multi-institutional mandate, the first ever, covering the 29 research institutes of the EUR-OCEANS consortium.

The next full edition of Dramatic Growth is the early year-end edition, to be released by mid-December. If your OA initiative reaches an important milestone, don't hesitate to drop me a line.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.