Cites & Insights: The Gold OA Landscape 2011-2014

"This issue consists of an excerpted version of The Gold OA Landscape 2011- 2014, published September 10, 2015 as a PDF ebook for $55.00 and on September 11, 2015 as a paperback book for $60.00. Both are currently available at Lulu.com (use the links, repeated here: http://www.lulu.com/content/ebook/the-gold-oa-landscape-2011-2014/17262336 for the ebook, http://www.lulu.com/content/paperback-book/the-gold-oa-landscape-2011- 2014/17264390 for the paperback book. Both editions have ISBNs: 978-1- 329-54713-1 for the PDF, 978-1-329-54762-9 for the paperback. The paperback should eventually be available through Amazon, Ingram or Barnes & Noble, but I don’t know when that will happen. This book represents the first overview of essentially all of serious gold OA—that is, what’s published by the journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. I believe it’s important for all OA publishers and for many libraries and OA advocates. If it does well, or if there’s some form of alternative funding, I’ll continue tracking the field in the future ... How many open access (OA) articles are published each year? How many open access (OA) journals publish how many OA articles? What proportion of those journals and articles involve fees (usually called Article Processing Charges or APCs)? Those seemingly-simple questions don’t have simple answers. The first one may not have an answer at all. This report provides a reasonably complete set of answers to the second and third questions and provides a detailed picture of the Gold OA landscape—that is, journals that make all refereed articles immediately available for anybody to read and download from the Internet, at no cost and with no barriers. This report is based on an exhaustive study of Gold OA journals as represented by the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) as of June 8, 2015, excluding journals that began publishing in 2015 (and two accidental duplications in DOAJ) ..."