Walt at Random » Blog Archive » 72% and 41%: A Gold OA 2011-2014 preview

"I’ve just finished the data gathering and regathering and rechecking for the Gold OA 2011-2014 project, and am procrastinating before starting the analysis and writing to offer a couple of Big Numbers, numbers that can be compared to those on page 32 of the June 2015 American Libraries. Those numbers, for a large subset of DOAJ-listed journals (but omitting a couple of thousand lacking English interfaces) and for calendar 2013, were that just over 6,490 journals published just over 366,000 articles, that 67% of the journals didn’t charge author-side fees (APCs) but that 64% of articles were in APC-charging journals, and that the average cost per article for articles published in APC-charging journals (assuming no waivers, and weighted by the articles published in each journal) was $1,045, or an average of $630 per article including articles in free journals. That was then. This is now: with a much larger subset of DOAJ (9,824: more than half again as many) that I could fully analyze, and with a much larger group of articles (more than 505,000, up from the 400,000 for 2014 for the 6,490-journal subset). This really is essentially all of DOAJ: there were only 20 cases were I couldn’t analyze a journal because Google’s translation wasn’t good enough; the other missing journals are missing for a variety of reasons, including not being reachable. And here are the key figures: among those 9,824 journals, in 2014, 71.7% (call it 72%) did not charge APCs but 59.1% of the articles (down from 64%) were in journals that did charge APCs. The average APC per article for articles published in APC-charging journals was up slightly, to $1,086; that yields an overall average that’s actually down slightly at $609. (Part of the slight increase may be a shift from 2013 to 2014; part may be due to including more than three thousand additional journals.) ,,,"