Cites & Insights 14:11 (December 2014) available

The December 2014 Cites & Insights (14:11) is now available for downloading at http://citesandinsights.info/civ14i11.pdf

This print-oriented two-column version is 34 pages long.

If you plan to read the issue online or on an ereader (tablet, notebook, etc.), you may prefer the single-column 6x9" version, available at http://citesandinsights.info/civ14i11on.pdf

The single-column version is 77 pages long, because the issue includes many tables, which aren't broken across columns or pages.

The issue consists of one essay, really the second part of a two-part essay (and you'll want to read the first part, in the October/November 2014 C&I or its one-column equivalent, first):

Intersections: Journals and "Journals":
Taking a Deeper Look: Part 2: DOAJ Subset and Additional Notes

If you've been reading various commentaries about Gold OA journals--including Part 1--you may be wondering where all those supposed no-fee Gold OA journals are. This piece helps to tell that story. Specifically, of 2,843 journals in the Directory of Open Access Journals as of May 7, 2014 that have an English interface version, aren't from either OASPA members or Beall-list publishers, and are not about aspects of medicine or biology--and that actually published one or more articles between January 2011 and June 30, 2014--more than 78% do not charge fees of any sort, and those journals published 53% of the articles published by the whole group during that period. Those percentages grow to almost 92% and more than 81%, respectively, for 1,426 journals in the humanities and social sciences.

This article looks at the "DOAJ set" in depth, including new tables that show distribution of articles (and journals publishing articles during a year) on a year-by-year basis, including the percentage of free journals and articles from those journals for each year. But there's more: I also look at journals by broad topic (27 of them, in 8 even broader groups and two extremely broad supergroups), showing simplified tables for each topic within the DOAJ set and overall numbers for all three sets (OASPA, Beall and DOAJ). Broader groups are compared for all three sets.

There's a brief discussion (with two graphs) of starting dates for journals. There's a less-brief consideration of average cost per article by topic, making some simplifying assumptions Those expecting my comments on the new DOAJ criteria and my thoughts on diseconomies of scale for some kinds of OA journal will have to wait for the January 2015 C&I, which will also look at (at least some of the) DOAJ journals omitted this time around.