Some Notes on GOA4 [Gold Open Access 4]

"For the last couple of years, two issues of Cites & Insights were direct offshoots of the Gold Open Access Journals (now Gold Open Access) series: one consisting of the first few chapters of the book, the second consisting of a subject supplement, adding more tables on each subject in the book. I didn’t do that for GOA4. The June 2018 issue, consisting of the first seven chapters of GOAJ3: Gold Open Access Journals 2012-2017, has had very little readership, and the July 2018 issue, the Subject Supplement to GOAJ3, hasn’t done much better. In the first case, I conclude that the partial republication isn’t serving enough people to be worthwhile; in the second, perhaps the subject supplement doesn’t serve much of a purpose. (The 2017 subject supplement has had more than 2,000 downloads to date; the 2018, only 357.) I also wanted to try something different: to see whether brief profiles of publishers with ten or more DOAJ-listed OA journals would be interesting and useful. So I did a third book, Gold Open Access 2013-2018: Subject and Publisher Profiles, combining the subject supplement with similar two-page profiles of about 30 traditional, OA and society publishers and about 100 university publishers...."