I stumbled across the question of publisher size while preparing for an earlier article. From the viewpoint of an economist, the size distribution of Open Access publishers looked inefficient. In this article I first explore reasons to be sceptical to a situation with a large number of small publishers. Then I go through the numbers from the Directory of Open Access Journals, also discussing problems inherent in the material. The results are then compared to similar data about Toll Access publishing. A conclusion is that, even though numbers may lack in exactitude, there seems to be a need for institutions to look at how they organize their publishing activities.
Much of the debate on Plan S seems to concentrate on how to make toll-access journals open access, taking for granted that existing open access journals are Plan S-compliant. We suspected this was not so and set out to explore this using Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ) metadata. We conclude that a large majority of open access journals are not Plan S-compliant, and that it is small publishers in the humanities and social sciences (HSS) not charging article processing charges (APC) that will face the largest challenge with becoming compliant. Plan S needs to give special considerations to smaller publishers and/or non-APC based journals.
In December 2012, DOAJ’s (The Directory of Open Access Journals) parent company, IS4OA, announced they would introduce new criteria for inclusion in DOAJ and that DOAJ would collect vastly more information from journals as part of the accreditation process—journals already included would need to reapply in order to be kept in the registry. My working hypothesis was that the journals removed from DOAJ on May 9th 2016 would chiefly be journals from small publishers (mostly single journal publishers) and that DOAJ journal metadata information would reveal that they were journals with a lower level of publishing competence than those that would remain in the DOAJ. Among indicators of publishing competence could be the use of APCs (Article Processing Charges), permanent article identifiers, journal licenses, article level metadata deposited with DOAJ, archiving policy/solutions and/or having a policy in SHERPA/RoMEO, the database containing self-archiving policies for more than 30,000 journals. The analysis shows my concerns to be correct.
In a number of articles or books, advertising is pointed to as a possible way of financing open access (OA) journals. Very little work seems to have been done on finding out how advertising actually functions as a source of financing for OA journals. A survey was carried out to explore the field, both why journals did not employ advertising, and how advertising was employed. The findings show little uptake of advertising among OA journals, and indicate that there is a lack of understanding of how advertising could best be employed.
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