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 2023 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 OA journals publish 50 articles each per year and another 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.