[GOAL] Open access researchers: let's cooperate

[Heather Morrison]

It's great to see lots of people conducting research on open access. There is no lack of work to do, so the more the merrier! 

In some areas there can be a lot of tedious manual work and/or development of complicated formulae to bring together different datasets. For example, my team plans to download DOAJ metadata on May 15 with an eye to updating our May 2014 sample of the minority of DOAJ journals charging APCs. This involves gathering APC-related information from at least 1,432 journals, and it would be ideal to include all of the journals charging APCs. If anyone else has similar plans, please let us know. Perhaps we could divide up the work and get more done with less time.

Note that my team is currently focused exclusively on the fully OA journals listed in DOAJ. Hybrids and the journals on Beall's list are important too, but beyond scope for us for workload reasons.

If a number of researchers are planning similar surveys, sharing plans and questions would give us all an opportunity to have more comparable data by using the same questions and minimizing the possibility of lowering response rates by sending out surveys with overlap.

The Open Access Directory has sections for Research Questions and Research in Progress that we can use for sharing this information:
http://oad.simmons.edu/oadwiki/Research_in_progress

I've posted an overview update of the research in progress by the Sustaining the Knowledge Commons team here:
http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/2015/05/07/forthcoming-research-and-an-invitation-to-cooperate/

In brief:

Interviews and focus groups with small scholar-led journals that either are, or would like to be, open access, to determine resource requirements (this is the sector I see as likely to be both the most cost-effective and the best model to prioritize scholarship and the public interest. Early writing forthcoming soon.

OA APCs: longitudinal studies including May 2014, May 2015, and the 2010 Bjork and Solomon study.
OA APCs: subject and DOAJ publication count APC correlation (hypothesis: some types of APC charging journals will either start charging or increase prices as their content increases)
OA APCs: impact factor correlation (hypothesis: some type of APC charging journals with increase costs disproportionately when they receive impact factors and/or increase in rankings. Effect may not be immediate).

best,

-- 
Dr. Heather Morrison
Assistant Professor
École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies
University of Ottawa
http://www.sis.uottawa.ca/faculty/hmorrison.html
Sustaining the Knowledge Commons http://sustainingknowledgecommons.org/
Heather.Morrison at uottawa.ca