[GOAL] Re: Interview with Harvard's Stuart Shieber

[Ross Mounce]

On 12 December 2012 23:15, Hans Pfeiffenberger
<hans.pfeiffenberger at awi.de>wrote:

> for your convenience: the link, again, was:
> http://svpow.com/2012/12/10/what-does-it-cost-to-publish-a-gold-open-access-article/
>


Mike Taylor was probably getting his figures from:

Solomon, D. J. and Björk, B.-C. 2012. A study of open access journals using
article processing charges. J Am Soc Inf Sci Tec 63:1485-1495.
http://dx.doi.org/10.1002/asi.22673

also available for free at http://www.openaccesspublishing.org/apc2/

some relevant facts and figures from this paper (do please read it for
yourselves!)

Only 26% of DOAJ-listed (as of 23-Aug-2011) journals charge an APC.

"Walters and Linvill (2011) examined 663 journals selected from the DOAJ in
six fields of which 29% charged APCs. They noted while 29% of the journals
charged APCs, they accounted for approximately 50% of the articles."

summary of another previous study: Dallmeier-Tiessen et al 2011
"Almost 23,000 authors who had published an article in an OA journal where
asked about how much they had paid. Half of the authors had not paid any
fee at all, and only 10% had paid fees exceeding 1,000 Euros."



As for David Prosser's comments, I agree that a 'by journal' assessment of
things may be misleading but...
cross-referencing with the figure given in Solomon & Bjork (2012) of
100,697 articles published in 2010 appearing in 1370 DOAJ-listed journals.

PLoS journals (all) only account for ~26500 articles in 2010  & BMC
journals (all) only ~21,000 articles in 2010
(as can be surmised from a quick Web of Knowledge query).

Thus these two high-volume high-profile OA publishers only account for less
than half of all possible APC-fee paying articles in 2010.

Additionally, as someone in the field of palaeontology I happen to know for
a fact that PLoS (and probably BMC too) routinely give out discounts or
*full* fee waivers to those authors that genuinely can't afford to pay
them, many in my field are making use of this. So it would be wrong to
assume that all ~47,500 of those PLoS & BMC articles in 2010 paid full fees.

If you're interested in this, I thoroughly recommend reading the Solomon &
Bjork paper.


Ross





-- 
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Ross Mounce
PhD Student & Open Knowledge Foundation Panton Fellow
Fossils, Phylogeny and Macroevolution Research Group
University of Bath, 4 South Building, Lab 1.07
http://about.me/rossmounce
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