Hello, everyone.
Happy New Year!
Pardon my delay in replying to this list on this question, as I've been at
the APE meeting in Berlin (where I was so busy dealing with the evolving
program that I didn't even get a chance to say hi to Rick...)

Happy to weigh in on exactly how many OA articles are funded by APCs. The
question about coverage of hybrid journals is a good one, and something
that we at Delta Think has looked into, and gathered data for as part of
our market studies. We will run some analysis of our data and see if we can
come up with figures for market dominance of APC-funded journals, including
hybrid OA output. We don’t usually include all DOAJ-listed journals in our
analyses, but we’ll see if we can, so we can try and get a like-for-like
result to compare with Walt Crawford’s data. We’ll publish the results in
our next monthly analysis, which we brand “News and Views.” As always, News
and Views is free to read at News | Delta Think
<https://www.deltathink.com/blog>. Stay tuned for February post!

Thanks,

Heather

On Thu, Jan 9, 2025 at 10:44 AM Rick Anderson <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

> (It just goes to show that no matter how many times you proofread a
> listserv post, you’ll still find errors after you hit <send>. Corrected
> version below.)
>
>
>
> Happy new year, fellow Café denizens!
>
>
>
> Yesterday I was reading the current issue of Clarke & Esposito’s
> always-essential _*The Brief*_ newsletter (
> https://www.ce-strategy.com/the-brief/), and was hipped to a recent
> article in _*Science*_ examining the model and success level of SciELO (
> https://tinyurl.com/ms4ns5j4). The article included, almost in passing, a
> graphical representation of the findings of a 2024 study by Walt Crawford
> that shows the degree of market dominance currently enjoyed by the APC
> funding model. This prompted a few thoughts, including:
>
>
>
>    - Ten years ago, Crawford’s data indicated that between 2011 and 2014,
>    APCs funded roughly 57% of published OA articles (
>    http://walt.lishost.org/2015/08/72-and-41-a-gold-oa-2011-2014-preview/).
>    According to his current data, between 2019 and 2023 twice as many articles
>    were published in Gold (APC-funded) OA journals as in Diamond (no APC)
>    journals. This represents a massive shift – driven largely, I suspect, by
>    the proliferation of OA megajournals, which are invariably APC-funded and
>    which publish thousands (and in some cases tens of thousands) of articles
>    per year.
>    - By counting only articles published in DOAJ-listed journals,
>    Crawford’s studies radically _*undercount*_ the number of APC-funded
>    OA articles published – because DOAJ does not list hybrid journals, which
>    always charge an APC for OA and which produce a lot of genuinely OA
>    articles (though exactly how many, no one knows).
>    - It’s been a longstanding talking point of the OA advocacy community
>    that “most journals do not charge APCs.” While this is true, it is
>    decreasingly meaningful as a reflection of what’s happening in scholarly
>    publishing. For example: if three Diamond OA journals publish 50 articles
>    each per year and an APC-Gold journal publishes 30,000, then it’s true that
>    in that sample Diamond journals outnumber APC-Gold journals three to one –
>    and that’s a data point worth knowing. But it’s also true that Diamond
>    articles represent only half a percent of the published content. In my
>    view, that’s the much more important data point to bear in mind if you want
>    to understand the scholcomm landscape.
>
>
>
> I’d be interested to hear others’ thoughts on these data points (or
> others) and their possible implications.
>
>
>
>
>
> ---
>
> Rick Anderson
>
> University Librarian
>
> Brigham Young University
>
> (801) 422-4301
>
> [log in to unmask]
>
>
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