Friday, December 02, 2016

Cites & Insights Number 200 available

A very special Cites & Insights, Volume 17, Issue 1, whole number 200, is now available for downloading at http://cical.info/civ17i1.pdf (or at http://citesandinsights.info/civ17i1.pdf if you prefer).

The 72-page 6" x 9" issue is a monograph:

Gray OA 2012-2016: Open Access Journals Beyond DOAJ

It's the result of several months of investigation into the rest of gold OA, beyond "serious gold OA" (journals in DOAJ). I liken it to making brandy out of sour grapes, since it relies on Beall's lists as the most complete known lists of "other" OA publishers and journals [journals that are also in DOAJ--a few hundred--aren't included in the monograph].

This monograph is not available in paperback form; at 72 pages (actually 68 + front matter) it just didn't make sense. It looks at -- gulp -- more than 18,900 journals and "journals," of which 7,743 appear to have published at least one article between 1/1/2012 and 6/30/2016--and, if you're familiar with a certain article claiming 420,000 "predatory" articles in 2014 [Chapter 4 of this monograph deals with that paper], the maximum number of articles for 2014 appears to be 255,183--but only 113,996 of these were in journals on the lists at the time the article was done, and only 29,947 in journals where a legitimate case against the journal or publisher had been made.

It doesn't look like a typical issue (the first page is a book title page but with the C&I banner at the bottom of the page) and it's distinctly not typical: more effort went into this issue than into a year's worth of typical issues.