[GOAL] Re: Is $99 per article realistic and compatible with profits - or too high a price?

[Heather Morrison]

On 2013-01-29, at 11:01 AM, Ross Mounce wrote:

...and as I've told you elsewhere, where open access journals use Creative Commons licences CC BY is by far the most common choice (whether you count that by publisher, journal OR article volume)

Comment

>From Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter - as of May 2012: "for present purposes we can say that roughly 88% of OA journals don't use CC-BY". For details and data, see the June 2012 SPARC Open Access Newsletter:
http://www.earlham.edu/~peters/fos/newsletter/06-02-12.htm

Do you have any data to support your assertion that the majority of OA publishers use CC-BY? This strikes me as counter to logic. If less than 12% of OA journals use CC-BY and some of the larger OA publishers (with a number of journals each) use CC-BY, this  suggests that the majority of OA publishers do not use CC-BY. Remember that PLoS + BMC / Springer + Hindawi = 3 publishers. 

If you have any actual data on article volume that would be helpful. In interpreting this data, it is important to take into account the total volume. When PLoS ONE became the world's largest journal a couple of years ago, publishing 14,000 articles in one year, that was remarkable, a real milestone for OA. But let's not forget that that 14,000 articles is still less than 1% of the approximately 1.5 million scholarly articles published in a year.

For the future: now that PLoS ONE has a number of competitors, it will be interesting to see whether this pioneer retains this volume. If other publishers offer authors a choice of CC licenses, and not all authors prefer CC-BY, this could give PLoS ONE competitors a bit of an edge. 

best,

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