Dramatic Growth of Open Access: June 30, 2010 (brief version)

The June 30, 2010 issue of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access is now available for viewing or open data download.

Highlights this quarter:

Open access policy continues to be the headline growth story, particularly institutional OA mandates and total OA mandates, both of which have more than doubled over the past year. There are now a total of 220 mandates.

DOAJ is now over 5,000 journals - congratulations, DOAJ!! By my calculations, this means that about 20% of the world's peer-reviewed journals are now open access*. DOAJ title growth was particularly strong this quarter, 277 titles or an average of 3 titles per day (over the past year, 888 titles added, over 2 titles per day). In addition to title growth, DOAJ is showing growth in the number of titles and articles searchable at article level - the latter is now over 400,000.

BASE added about 1.5 million documents this quarter, or about half a million documents per month.

As reported by Bjork et al in PLoS One, about 1 in 5 articles published in 2009 are now freely available.

This is a brief version of DGOA so that I can get back to the LIBER 2010 Conference in beautiful Aarhus, Denmark as quickly as possible. For more, please see my Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series, where I often include links to highlights to other milestones and indicators of growth.

* Note that both traditional measures of peer-reviewed journals and OA counts are missing important data, such as numbers of journals from China. I would appreciate hearing from anyone who has ideas on how to address this.

Open Access Journals Support in Canada

Preliminary results of the Open Access Journals Support in Canada research project, as presented by myself and Brian Owen on behalf of research team members including Donald Taylor, Andrew Waller, and Kumiko Vezina at the June 1, 2010 Canadian Association of Learned Journals (CALJ) Annual General Meeting, part of the Congress conference, are now available in the SFU D-Space and E-LIS.

Abstract

Describes preliminary results of the pan-Canadian Open Access Journals Support in Canada survey of university libraries and presses conducted in spring 2010. The majority of respondents are involved in scholarly journal publishing, with more planning to get involved. There is strong trend towards preferential support for open access publishing. Responses to questions about support for a variety of open access models indicated that any model for OA transition would received some level of support from a majority of libraries.

On the wide disparity in publisher cost-efficiency

Libraries and librarians are continuing to cope with the impact of the global financial crisis, and I understand that some of us are beginning to wonder why our libraries are facing deep budget cuts and staff furloughs while a few of the largest commercial publishers are boasting record profits.

Understandable, some are beginning to look for a better deal, and personally I think this is a very good thing. However, this might be a good time to highlight that there is a very wide discrepancy in the cost-effectiveness of different types of publishers. It it not fair, IMHO, to treat the mission-oriented publisher that has never charged more than they needed to survive, as if they were the same as the highly for-profit publishers. By all means, let's look for deals - but let's not forget that a 3% increase to a $100 subscription is only $3, while a 3% increase to a $1 million subscription is $30,000 - and the $3 increase might mean the difference to survival for the efficient publisher, while the for-profit would have to give up more than $30,000 to even begin to have something resembling a revenue cut of a much smaller order of magnitude than what is faced by many a library.

One extreme example from our own profession:

As of today, the subscription list price for the for-profit Library Management (Emerald) is EUR 11,819 (Ulrich's). That's $14,600 US (Bank of Canada currency conversion service, June 18, 2010). Compare this with the MAXIMUM institutional cost for ACRL's College and Research Libraries at $80 US for non-member institutions outside of the US and Canada. This is a difference of well over a hundred fold in subscription cost for these two journals, and I would argue that of the two, it is ACRL's College and Research Libraries that is the more prestigious. I do acknowledge that single subscription costs are of limited applicability in the world of bundled and largely consortial pricing. Also, this is an extreme example. Cost differentials in the range of 4 to 10-fold appear to be much more common (that is, the cost of one journal on a per-article basis can be a four to 10 times as much for another journal of similar or every higher quality. Imperfect though this example is, it is illustrative of the wide difference in costs between different publishers which does not necessarily correlate in a positive manner with quality.

The original analysis for this example is from my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians, Chandos Publishing: Oxford, 2009. The cost differential has increased since the time the book was written; the ACRL cost is stable, while the Emerald cost has risen considerably.

[Disclosure: I am co-coordinator of the ARL and ACRL Scholarly Communication Institute webinar series, Building Strength through Collaboration, however this has nothing to do with ACRL publications or membership].

Heather Morrison, MLIS
The Imaginary Journal of Poetic Economics
http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.com

This post was distributed to a number of listservs on Thursday, June 17, 2010

Update June 17, 2010 - this post by Bernd-Christoph Kaemper to Scholcomm and Liblicense-l is worth repeating in full:

Oh, well, Emerald again ...

Emerald (formerly MCB) has received its fair share of criticism in the past (including some from me, back in those days of the newsletter of serials pricing issues), but I've learned since then, that Emerald is an extreme example of pricing policies that appear to address the bold and adventurous among us, those that have no fear to apply all the techniques learned on the bazaar, rather than the timid, who ask for the list price and turn pale in horror.

To put it simple and bluntly, if you actually have a few Emerald titles in your collection that you pay at list price instead of a bundle, you or your predecessors in your job probably made a terrible mistake, or your institution has/had too much money to spend. Just cancel and start anew.

For some historical reason, that eludes my comprehension (although I'd love to hear explanations), single title prices with Emerald are fantasy prices. If you actually start talking to Emerald (and they really have friendly and competent staff), you'll be surprised to learn that it can be possible to get a package of titles for less than the list price of the most expensive title(s) in it, and that you actually might be able to get a rather decent offer for your campus or consortium. (Disclosure: my perspective and experience is that of a large technical university with comparatively small business and social sciences, but I have also talked to colleagues from other universities.)

Essentially, you buy Emerald as a full text database (various sizes and collections available) and have to judge its efficiency on that basis (i.e. on an aggregated cost per use base), not any individual titles a la carte which would be terribly expensive.

With respect to transparency and investigations of publisher cost efficiency and value for money on the basis of various possible metrics: I guess this is a prime example of why Ted Bergstrom, Paul Courant and Preston McAfee were right to ask libraries and consortia to disclose the actual terms of their bundle deals (under a public-records request) rather to rely on list prices, cf. e.g. the ARL press release Elsevier Motion to Block License Release Denied in Open-Records Decision, http://www.arl.org/news/pr/elsevier-wsu-23jun09.shtml
and Ted Bergstroms Journal Pricing page,
http://www.econ.ucsb.edu/~tedb/Journals/jpricing.html

I'll leave it to others who are in a better position to do this to possibly comment on the actual cost efficiency of Emerald compared to other publishers in economics on an aggregate basis, but my understanding is that this was also not the focus or intention of your actual message (to look at any particular publisher). I only wanted to give a little warning that individual title list prices have very little meaning here. (And please take also the bazaar analogy above with a grain of salt. The positive message here is: the publisher might be more responsive to your needs and constraints then you would have assumed.)

I'd also question your placative and simplistic contrasting of the (efficient) "mission-oriented publisher that has never charged more than they needed to survive" with the (inefficient) "highly for-profit publishers".

That's a poetic notion not one that adequately matches today's complex business realities for scholarly publishers, both for-profit and not-for-profit.

The question of cost-efficiency is a complex one, cf. for a starter the the JISC Report

Economic Implications of Alternative Scholarly Publishing Models: Exploring the costs and benefits (Jan 2009)

and the Feedback on it provided by STM and ALPSP, as discussed under
http://www.jisc.ac.uk/publications/reports/2009/economicpublishingmodelsfinalreport.aspx

Best regards,
Bernd-Christoph Kaemper, Stuttgart University Library

Comment

This is very helpful information, thank you Bernd-Christoph. I should clarify that I do not mean to paint Emerald as a "bad guy" at all; in fact, Emerald has a very enlightened approach to green OA self-archiving policies. Nevertheless, I think that this fantasy price model - which I suspect is not unique to Emerald - bears further investigation. I plan to mull this over a little. On the other hand, ACRL and College and Research Libraries, producing top quality scholarly publishing at rock-bottom prices and making good efforts towards open access by supporting author self-archiving, and making many articles fully open access, is, in my mind, a clear-cut good guy.

This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access series. From my perspective, a healthy open access future for scholarly communication should be built on sustainable business models.

Update July 4: for commentary on the fantasy pricing model, see Barbara Fister at Library Journal.

Open Access submission to Canada's Digital Economy Consultation

On behalf of a group of Canadian and international open access advocates, I have just contributed a submission to Canada's Digital Economy Consultation. It may be a few days before this appears on the government web site. The text of the submission can be viewed here. Update June 19: the submission is now available on the Industry Canada site.

The brief Executive Summary as posted to the government website is as follows:

We recommend that Canada develop a policy requiring open access to federally funded Canadian scholarship, i.e. research funded by the research granting councils CIHR, SSHRC, NSERC, and NRC. This policy would ensure taxpayer access to taxpayer-funded research, maximum impact of taxpayer-funded research, bring Canadian policy into line with international policy developments, and appropriately secure a place for Canada as a leader in this important area of innovation.

The policy needed is for researchers funded by federal granting agencies to be required to deposit, in their institution’s open access repository, a copy of the author’s final manuscript of all published peer-reviewed articles arising from federally funded research, immediately on acceptance for publication, with access to the deposit set as open access immediately, or after a minimum delay to accommodate publishers. The locus of deposit should be an appropriate open access repository; by default, the author’s institutional repository. Cross-deposits from institutional to central repositories (such as PubMedCentral Canada, as mandated by CIHR) can then be done automatically by software.

In 2008, CIHR adopted a Policy on Access to Research Outputs, which is in many ways an exemplary policy, although there is a loophole to be addressed, as it allows for opt-out based on publisher copyright policies. This is neither justified nor necessary. While the contributions of professional publishers are very valuable, the published article reflects the contributions of many parties, including the Canadian taxpayer, the authors, their institutions, the voluntary peer reviewers, and often human subjects as well. No one contributor to the process should have exclusive rights to the final report; an open access requirement is reasonable and fair to all.

In addition, researchers should be encouraged to do the same with their research data (while ensuring that confidentiality / anonymity of research subjects is maintained), as well as with other works, such as monographs and creative works, wherever possible.

The simple no-cost step of requiring open access deposit would have tremendous impact in advancing the effectiveness and dissemination of Canadian research.

Update June 16: if you would like to add your (or your organization's) name, please let me know at hgmorris at sfu dot ca, and I will submit a revised version on July 9.

Anti-OA spin on Inside Higher Ed

Update June 15, 2010: Oxford University Press has issued a revised press release, which clarifies that the spin is indeed coming from OUP.

Excerpt

Through the Oxford Open initiative, launched in July 2005, Oxford University Press (OUP) has experimented with open access models and has been carefully monitoring and sharing results. Today, six Oxford journals are fully open access and over 90 are hybrid open access, where authors of accepted papers are given the option of paying an open access publication charge to make their paper freely available online immediately.

In 2009 the average uptake of the open access option for participating journals fell to 5.9%, compared with 6.7% in 2008. This reduction was due to a lower uptake amongst 11 new titles joining Oxford Open in 2009. On a like-for-like basis, the average uptake in 2009 for journals which entered the scheme prior to 2008 was stable (6.7%, compared with 6.8% in 2008).

Comment

From 2005 to 2010, based on this information, OUP has transitioned from a fully subscription model to a point where 6 OUP journals are fully open access, and 90 are hybrid open access. The Oxford Open option greatly understates open access, as it does not take into account author self-archiving, as explained in detail by Stevan Harnad at Open Access Archivangelism. From this press release, it appears that journals that have been participating for some time have a stable participation rate. OUP could be reporting open access success, but has chosen to focus on the negative.

In addition to what is obviously some success in moving towards OA at OUP, supplemented by author self-archiving, another factor to take into account is that authors desiring full open access might be choosing different journals. OUP charges article processing fees, while the vast majority of OA journals do not use this business model. Of the journals that do charge APFs, OUP may not be competitive on a cost per quality basis. Then, too, libraries that are supporting OA via APFs are often refusing to support hybrid journals.

I am not sure why OUP has chosen to focus on the negative. Their academic library customers are eager for change, and it appears that OUP is in a great position to take advantage of this desire. Why not market OUP as an alternative OA solution?

Here is Quick Take from today's Inside Higher Ed, repeated in full for purposes of scholarly critique:

Academics remain reluctant to allow their journal articles to be deposited in open-access repositories, according to the Oxford University Press. The press announced Thursday that the percentage of Oxford Press articles authorized for re-publication in its open-access repository decreased overall from 6.7 to 5.9 percent between 2008 and 2009. Officials attributed the decrease to a relatively low rate of opt-ins from 11 new journals to which the option was extended in 2009; putting those new titles aside, the proportion of authors allowing their work to be made freely available stayed roughly the same. Still, the stagnation of that rate indicates that researchers are still wary of endorsing an open-access model, Oxford officials said in a release. Humanities scholars were the least willing to participate in Oxford Open, the press's open-access initiative, opting in at a rate of 2.5 percent. Life sciences scholars were the most generous with their work, with 11.4 percent allowing their papers to be freely accessible.

Comment

Why the spin? According to this information, OUP has a stable rate of participation in Oxford Open for journals that have been participating for a while, and a lower rate of participation for journals that have just joined the program - hardly surprising, as the journals that were most keen to participate were likely part of the original group. Why add the numbers and spin this as if it were decreasing participation? If a statement like this were made in an article submitted to a journal for peer review, any journal worth its salt would refuse to publish the article unless the statement were revised. Note that I cannot find any such press release on the Oxford University Press site. My comment on the Inside Higher Ed site requests the original release to which this Quick Take is referring.

The latest open access controversy: are we in the age of open access, or just on the verge?

Debate in scholarship is a healthy sign - and this new debate amongst open access advocates, as recently emerged in the national meeting of Canada's Federation of Social Sciences and Humanities, is most welcome! It seems that there is a divergence of opinion amongst open access advocates, as to whether we are already in the age of open access, or just on the verge. I must admit to being on the fence on this debate myself; while the momentum of the OA movement does seem to be unstoppable at the moment, it is, from my perspective, prudent for OA activists to continue full steam - not to mention fun to be at the crest of such a successful movement!

Other aspects of recent debates are also very welcome; the days of questioning whether or not OA is a good thing are long past, with the current focus being very appropriately best practices for OA implementation.

Open Access Policies in Europe: David Prosser article

Enabling Open Scholarship has just released David Prosser's Open Access Policies in Europe. This succinct overview by one of open access' most noteworthy champions is a must-read for anyone involved in OA policy development or advocacy.

The journals of unfunded research

Recently in the Liblicense list, the idea came up that publishers could simply refuse to publish works by authors covered by open access policies. Of course, this is their right!

Publishers who share such view might wish to get together and form a new association, to plan their futures together. Here is my suggestion for a title for the association: The Journals for Strictly Limited Dissemination of the Works of Unfunded and Unemployed Researchers. Since this title is rather long, I suspect the abbreviation The Journals of Unfunded Research could quickly become popular.

The membership list of this association could be most helpful to librarians, in these difficult financial times when we need really good information about what to cut. And frankly, if journals are refusing articles written by the likes of authors at Harvard, MIT, as well as a large and growing list of other institutions, or funded by a growing list of the world's major research funders - it seems reasonable to ask what exactly they will be publishing in the near to medium term future.

For a list of the 220 open access mandate policies to date, see ROARMAP.

Food for all: letter to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) urging open access

Indian open access advocate Subbiah Arunachalam (Arun) has sent a letter to the Consultative Group on International Agricultural Research (CGIAR) urging that CGIAR require open access to CGIAR-funded research.

Following is the full text of the letter:

“Dear Dr Carlos Perez del Castillo/ Dr Kathy Sierra:

About a year ago, on 20 May 2009 to be precise, Dr William D Dar, Director General of ICRISAT sent a Memorandum on Launching of Open Access Model: Digital Access to ICRISAT Scientific Publications to all researchers and students in all locations of ICRISAT [http://openaccess.icrisat.org/MemoOnDAIS.pdf]. In the memorandum Dr Dar had said "Every ICRISAT scientist/author in all locations, laboratories and offices will send a PDF copy of the author's final version of a paper immediately upon receipt of communication from the publisher about its acceptance. This is not the final published version that certain journals provide post-print, but normally the version that is submitted following all reviews and just prior to the page proof."

ICRISAT is the only international agricultural research centre with an OA mandate, and is second among the research and education institutes operating from India, the first being the National Institute of Technology-Rourkela (http://dspace.nitrkl.ac.in/dspace/). ICRISAT publishes a research journal (http://www.icrisat.org/journal/) which is also an open access journal.

Since then is growing fast and the portal now has virtually all the research papers published in recent times, and all the books and learning material produced by ICRISAT researchers.

We believe that it would be great if other CGIAR laboratories could also mandate open access to their research publications. Indeed, it would be a good idea to have a system wide Open Access mandate for CGIAR and to have interoperable OA repositories in each CGIAR laboratory. Such a development would provide a high level of visibility for the work of CGIAR and greatly advance agricultural research. Besides, journals published by CGIAR labs could also be made OA. There are more than 1,500 OA repositories (listed in ROAR and OpenDOAR) and about 5,000 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). Currently over 2050 journals are searchable at article level. Over 390,000 articles are included in the DOAJ service.

The world will soon be celebrating the International Open Access Week [18-24 October 2010] and you may wish to announce the CGIAR OA mandate before then.

As you may be aware, all seven Research Councils of the UK and the National Institutes of Health, USA, have such a mandate in place for research they fund and support. To see the full list of ~220 mandates worldwide, see ROARMAP.

We look forward to seeing an early implementation of open access in all CGIAR labs.

Sincerely,
- Subbiah Arunachalam [Distinguished Fellow, Centre for Internet and Society,Bangalore, India]
- Remi Barre [Conservatoire National des Arts et Metiers (CNAM), Paris, France]
- Leslie Chan [University of Toronto at Scarborough, Canada]
- Anriette Esterhuysen [Association for Progressive Communications, Johannesburg, South Africa]
- Jean-Claude Guédon [University of Montreal, Canada]
- Stevan Harnad [Universite du Quebec a Montreal and University of Southampton]
- Neil Jacobs [JISC, UK]
- Heather Joseph [Executive Director, SPARC, USA]
- Barbara Kirsop [Electronic Publishing Trust for Development, UK]
- Heather Morrison [Simon Fraser University, Vancouver, Canada]
- Richard Poynder [Technology journalist, UK]
- T V Ramakrishnan, FRS [Banaras Hindu University and Indian Institute of Science; Former President of the Indian Academy of Sciences]
- Peter Suber [Berkman Fellow, Harvard University; Research Professor of Philosophy, Earlham College; Senior Researcher, SPARC; Open Access Project Director, Public Knowledge]
- Alma Swan [Director, Key Perspectives, UK]
- John Wilbanks [Vice President for Science, Creative commons]
- John Willinsky [Stanford University and University of British Columbia]”

Comment: bravo to Arun, our tireless defender of open access around the world! Let us hope that CGIAR heeds this message. What could possibly be more fair than ensuring that those who cannot always be sure to be able to afford quality food supplies, at the very least have guaranteed free access to the very research that is meant to help them?

Springer (owner of BMC) did NOT sign the anti-FRPAA letter

This correction to an earlier post bears repeating! According to Wim van der Stelt, Springer, EVP Business Development, Springer, owner of BioMedCentral, did NOT sign the anti-FRPAA letter of the AAP/PSP; Springer is currently not even a member! In fact, as reported in full here, Springer, owner of BMC, has quite an enlightened approach to open access.

It is my delight to profusely apologize to Springer (owner of BMC) for the mix-up.

Canada's Digital Economy Consultation: help vote up Open Access to Canadian Research

Update May 18: OA to Canadian Research is now at the top of the Canada's Digital Content section - just 13 votes from the top overall! Please register and vote today - and consider asking your organization to make a formal submission.

Please register for Canada's Digital Economy Consultation and vote for Open Access to Canadian Research under Canada's Digital Content. Currently OA is at 8 votes, just 2 behind the lead suggestion in this section of the Ideas Forum.

Private sector and long term responsibility for scholarly work? Nonsense!

In a recent letter opposing the U.S. Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA), Martin Frank writes: "Copyright is essential to protecting these works and to preserving incentives for the private sector to continue to invest in peer review, editing, publishing, and maintaining the electronic record of vetted scientific journal articles".

One issue with this sentence that I would like to highlight, for now: it is nonsense to suggest that the private sector has a meaningful role in long-term maintenance of scholarly articles.

A private sector publisher is completely within its rights to cease to exist, or change business operations, at any time. The public has no rights to ask a private sector entity to undertake a responsibility with an infinite time span. Has anyone asked publishers to undertake this role? If so, what were they thinking? This is not the traditional role of publishers, but rather the traditional role of libraries as a memory institution.

One of the benefits of the National Institutes of Health's Public Access Policy is that it moves the traditional role of the U.S. National Library of Medicine in preserving the medical research literature into the internet age, as well as sharing the burden globally through the developing PubMedCentral International network (with the UK and Canada up and running already). Academic libraries everywhere are busy ensuring the preservation of electronic collections, just as they have preserved print collections in the past (and present, of course).

On behalf of many: division within traditional publishers re anti-FRPAA lobbying

Correction May 20, 2010: I am delighted to report that Springer, owner of BioMedCentral, did NOT sign the anti-FRPAA letter and I originally reported. Rather, the letter was signed by Springer Publishing Company, a medical publishing company that has nothing to do with Springer/BMC.

Thanks to Wim van der Stelt, Springer, EVP Business Development, for this most helpful clarification:

"Your blogpost dated 05/12 about publishers anti frpaa letter contains a mistake that I’d really like to be corrected.

Springer is no signatory of the letter, we currently are even not a member of AAP/PSP. The Springer mentioned in the list of signatories is “Springer publishing company”, a medical publisher that is in no way related to Springer, let alone to BioMed Central.

I’d like to stress that Springer’s policy is to cooperate with customers and other stakeholders to further develop scholarly communication and that we are willing to experiment and develop new business models in case there is a need for that. That is the reason for our ongoing OA development activities, including the acquisition of BioMed Central".

Heather again:

My profuse apologies to Springer / BioMedCentral, and thanks very much to Wim van der Stelt and Springer for this most welcome feedback - and enlightened viewpoint.

This correction supports the major point of my blogpost, that there is division within traditional publishers regarding anti-FRPAA lobbying.

Original post, omitting the error:

A recent letter lobbying against FRPAA starts with: on behalf of many publisher members.

Interesting word, many. I have no doubt that the writer would have preferred to use words like "all", "almost all", or "most".

My take on this is that this is an indication of struggle within the anti-FRPAA lobbying group, which makes one wonder: just how strong is the opposition? For example, the letter refers to university presses; but only 3 presses are signatories, and only one of these is based in the U.S. (University of Chicago Press). According to the American Association of University Presses membership page, AAUP has over 130 members worldwide. If only 1 American University Press has signed this letter - this is less than 1% of the membership for this group.

It is curious that two UK university presses (Oxford and Cambridge) have signed, given that FRPAA is predated by OA policies at all of the UK Research Councils.

Even looking at the signatories, it is clear that there is internal struggle at these organizations as well. For example, Oxford University Press is a signatory, even though OUP has some innovative OA experiments in progress.

The letter can be downloaded from here.

Housekeeping: e-mail down on Sunday, May 16

Friends please note: my work e-mail will be down on Sunday, May 16, due to a major power shutdown on SFU Burnaby mountain campus. If you need to get in touch that day, try hgmorris at gmail dot com.

Canada's Digital Economy Consultation: preliminary thoughts

Tony Clement has opened up a consultation on Canada's Digital Economy - note that comments are due July 9th.

Preliminary thoughts:

Canada's Digital Economy strategy should reflect Canadian values, of universal rights to access and participation. Every Canadian, whether urban, rural, and including every First Nations community, should be able to participate in the digital economy. This means ubiquitous broadband access, and equity in access to education from kindergarten to post-secondary.

There is some welcome, but very weak support for open access in this report. This would be a good time for Canada to get up to speed on open access developments in other countries, notably the UK where all research councils require open access to the research that they fund, and the US Federal Research Public Access Act which is in progress.

As reported earlier on IJPE, the U.S. Communication and Computer Industries have recently released a report indicating the importance of industries relying on fair use. The Consultation document for Canada's Digital Economy strategy mentions that ICT accounts for 5% of GDP, and is rapidly growing, in comparison with the copyright-based industries that account for 3.8% GDP. This adds economic weight to fairness arguments for fair use / fair dealing. If we want the economy to flourish, we need LESS IP, not MORE. This would be a good time for leadership in demanding lowering copyright terms (perhaps to 14 years), and eliminating Crown copyright.

Creativity is important both to the economy, as mentioned in this report, and more importantly, to society. Welcome academic support for science is mentioned in this report; however, if the concern is with supporting the development of creativity, isn't the answer strong educational support for the arts and humanities, from kindergarten to post-secondary? Shouldn't we be supporting arts and culture in Canadian communities, so that they will be places where creative people want to live - and anyone would want to visit?

Over 20% of the world's scholarly journals now open access! (Kudos to DOAJ)

Update May 13: the current Ulrich's total for academic, refereed, active journals is just over 27,000, which makes the DOAJ 5,000 only 18.5%, not over 20% of the world's journals as measured by Ulrich's. It is likely that both Ulrich's and DOAJ seriously underrepresent academic journals in China. Thanks to Stian Haklev for the figures.

The Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) has just announced a list of milestones, including exceeding 5,000 journals. This is more than 20% of the world's scholarly peer reviewed journals, estimated at ~ 23,000 according to Ulrich's.

This is a conservative estimate. DOAJ is doing great work, but they are a small group, and kvetches from the open access community tend to center around the lag time it takes for new or converted journals to get through the DOAJ vetting process and be included in DOAJ.

If this is a concern for you - ask whether your local library, library consortia, or vendor who benefits from OA journals - is a member or supporter of DOAJ. As the notice points out, this support would be helpful to DOAJ to increase the services that people want of this popular site.

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

Fair Use in the U.S. Economy: Economic Contribution of Industries Relying on Fair Use

The Computer & Communications Industry Association has just released a report, Fair Use in the U.S. Economy: Economic Contribution of Industries Relying on Fair Use.

In brief, using economic analysis developed by WIPO to assess the contribution of copyright industries, this report finds that the industries relying on fair use contribute trillions to the U.S. economy, employ millions, and that this sector is growing much faster than the economy as a whole.

Full citation: Thomas Rogers & Andrew Szamosszegi, Fair Use in the U.S. Economy: Economic Contribution of Industries Relying on Fair Use (CCIA: 2010) available online at ccianet.org.

Elsevier 2009 $2 billion profits could fund worldwide OA at $1,383 per article

Update November 29, 2011:  Thanks to a comment on Sauropod Vertebra of the Week, I realized that my calculations were off by a bit - thanks to commenter Jeff Hecht at http://svpow.wordpress.com/2011/10/22/economics-of-open-source-publishing/According to Jeff's calculations, dividing Elsevier profit among all 1.5 million articles per year yields only $730 for OA article processing fees, not $1,383 as I had calculated. Nevertheless, this still supports my main point, that this system is not connecting with fiscal reality - the profits of one publisher could support a fully open access system, albeit at a more modest rate than my original calculation.

The original post follows:


Elsevier's Annual Report, reports "robust financial performance in unprecedented global recession", with operating profits up.

Elsevier per se and Lexis-Nexis each earned over $1 billion US IN PROFIT in 2009, for a profit rate of 35% (Elsevier) and 26% (Reed Elsevier). Together, this is MORE THAN $2 billion in profit from scholarly publishing in 2009.

If the total profit from Elsevier and Lexis-Nexis is added together and converted to U.S. dollars, the total is $2,075m. Divided by the estimated worldwide scholarly article output of 1.5 million articles per year (Björk et al, 2008), this comes out to $1,383 U.S.

In other words, the profits of this one company alone could fund a global, fully open access scholarly publishing system, at a rate of $1,383 U.S. per article.

A minority of open access journals charge article processing fees. Of those that do have such charges, some charge more than this amount; however, others charge less.

In other words, the world's scholarly journal article output could be published as fully open access with the funding that currently goes to the profits of just one company in this field.

Calculations are available here. Note currency conversion from GBP April 27, 2010


References

Björk, B., Roosr, A., & Lauri, M. (2008). Global annual volume of scholarly peer reviewed journal articles and the share available via different open access options. Paper presented at the ELPUB2008. Open Scholarship: Authority, Community, and Sustainability in the Age of Web 2.0 - Proceedings of the 12th International Conference on Electronic Publishing Held in Toronto, Canada 25-27 June 2008. Edited by: Leslie Chan and Susanna Mornati. Retrieved from http://elpub.scix.net/cgi-bin/works/Show?178_elpub2008

Reed Elsevier 2009 Annual Report

This post is part of the Transitioning to Open Access series.

Wiley STM: 3rd quarter profits up 18%

From John Wiley and Sons announces Third Quarter Fiscal Year 2010 Results:

"Global STMS revenue for the third quarter of fiscal year 2010 rose 13% to $228 million"

"Direct contribution to profit for the third quarter increased 18% to $89 million"

Comment: this is a 39% profit rate, at a time when library customers are hit hard by the effects of the Global Economic Crisis. Some of the profits are coming from outsourcing from high cost regions to low-cost regions. The U.S. is losing jobs in spite of all these profits.

Informa (Taylor & Francis etc.): profits up, majority renewing at previous high rates

According to the Informa 2009 Annual Report, the Adjusted Operating Margin (profit) is up to 25.3% in 2009 from 2008's 23.9%. From Highlights, Summaries, and Outlook: "the majority of subscriptions are renewing in line with previous high rates". As Executive Director Peter Rigby puts it, "”During a period of sustained economic decline across the world, our Publishing assets have performed exceptionally well". Publishing is now responsible for 72% of that 25.3% operating profit.

When the majority of customers worldwide are reeling from severe cutbacks from the global economic crisis, this is an excellent example of an inelastic market, not at all responsive to customers.