Thursday, April 24, 2014

Elsevier journals - some facts

Timothy Gowers' excellent post details his research looking for Elsevier pricing mechanisms and actual prices paid by university libraries through FOI requests. Lots of useful data noted here for future number-crunching.

Wednesday, April 16, 2014

Would Elsevier's Universal Access in the US raise Elsevier profits to 98.6%

Brian Matthews at Ubiquitous Librarian has calculated that it would cost the U.S. about $91 billion to purchase Elsevier Universal Access for everyone in the U.S. By my calculations, this move would have little to no impact on Elsevier costs, therefore increasing Elsevier's global STM revenue 25-fold and increasing their profit margin from 39% to 98.6%. Following are my calculations. 

Elsevier's Universal Access is their corporate alternative to open access - the vision where open access is not necessary, because everyone on the planet is covered by an Elsevier subscription. Brian Matthews at Ubiquitous Librarian estimates that a U.S. national subscription to Elsevier Universal Access for the U.S. would cost $91 billion U.S. That's 25 times Elsevier's global STM revenues of approximately $3.7 billion U.S. (based on $2.2 million UK pounds converted at today's rate as quoted by Bank of Canada). That $3.7 billion U.S. already accounts for a 39% profit margin. Universal Access for everyone in the U.S. would likely have little to no impact on Elsevier's costs (those who really need the journals already subscribe, and any slight increase in usage costs is likely to be more than offset by a decrease in technical support and sales costs). If Matthew's calculations are correct, this would mean that Elsevier profits would increase from $1.3 billion U.S. (based on 826 million GBP) would increase to approximately $89.7 billion U.S., a profit rate of 98.6%.

My post calculating the Elsevier 39% profit margin and highlighting key Elsevier financial data is available here: http://poeticeconomics.blogspot.ca/2014/03/elsevier-stm-publishing-profits-rise-to.html

Monday, April 07, 2014

Dramatic Growth of Open Access First Quarter 2014

Highlights this quarter: three open access initiatives illustrating particularly strong growth this quarter are featured (Directory of Open Access Books, Highwire Press free sites, and PubMedCentral with 5 of the top 15 spots by quarterly growth rate). The number of journals in DOAJ has decreased this quarter; please note that this reflects a vigorous weeding process at DOAJ rather than a decrease in fully open access journals. For example, the number of articles searchable at the article level through DOAJ increased by over 21,000 this quarter. To download the full datasets or the most recent rationale and method, see the Dramatic Growth of Open Access dataverse at Morrison, Heather, 2014-03, "Dramatic Growth of Open Access", http://hdl.handle.net/10864/10660 Morrison, Heather [Distributor] V1 [Version]
Please note that there an issue with this URL has been resolved.
Double kudos to the Directory of Open Access Books (DOAB) for taking the two highest places for quarterly growth as measured in percentage. DOAB added 293 open access monographs this quarter for an 18% growth rate (annual equivalent 72%)  and a total of 1,912 books as of March 31, 2014. DOAB also added 8 new publishers for a 15% quarterly growth rate (annual equivalent 60%) and a total of 62 publishers. I hope my small contribution of faculty library start-up funds to the Knowledge Unlatched pilot helped with this!

This quarter's data has a few indicators which suggest an increased tendency for traditional society publishers to move to open access. Highwire Press' completely free sites had the third highest growth by percentage this quarter, adding 10 journals for an 11% quarterly growth rate (annual equivalent 44%) and a total of 99 titles.

PubMedCentral staff have obviously been very busy this quarter, enough to take up a third of the top 15 spots by quarterly growth rate for journal participation alone (PMC free article growth has its own worksheet). PMC indicators that grew by more than 5% this quarter (20% annual equivalent) include the number of journals with some articles open access (up 8% / 23 journals to 310 journals), the number of journals with immediate free access (up 5% / 64 journals to 1,252 journals), the number of journals that deposit ALL articles in PMC (up 5% / 68 journals to 1,462 journals, the number of journals with all articles open access (up 5% / 49 journals to 1,070 journals), and the number of journals actively participating in PMC (up 5% / 79 journals to 1,769 journals).

Selected numbers
 
 
Quarterly growth (numeric) Quarterly growth (percentage) Annual growth (numeric) Annual growth (percentage)
Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ)  http://www.doaj.org/
# of DOAJ journals  9,709 -95 -1% 862 10%
# of titles added last 30 days (DOAJ)
# of countries (added March 31, 2013) (DOAJ) 133 9 7% 12 10%
# of journals searchable at article level (DOAJ) 5,621 -15 0% 1,082 24%
# of articles searchable at article level (DOAJ) 1,595,722 21,875 1% 539,905 51%
Directory of Open Access Books http://www.doabooks.org/
# of academic peer-reviewed books (DOAB) 1,912 293 18% 518 37%
# publishers (DOAB) 62 8 15% 14 29%
Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliotek - Electronic Journals Library  # journals that can be read free of charge http://rzblx1.uni-regensburg.de/ezeit/index.phtml?bibid=AAAAA&colors=7&lang=en 44,756 1,258 3% 5,529 14%
Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliotek - total # of journals (added March 31, 2014) 75,337
Elektronische Zeitschriftenbibliotek - # online-only journals (added March 31, 2014) 13,536
Highwire Press Free Online Fulltext Articles  http://highwire.stanford.edu/lists/freeart.dtl
# free articles (Highwire) 2,344,479 16,186 1% 84,682 4%
total # articles (Highwire) 7,174,703 -77,113 -1% 101,110 1%
Highwire Completely Free Sites 99 10 11% 28 39%
Sites with free back issues (Highwire) 275 -4 -1% -9 -3%
Open DOAR  http://www.opendoar.org/  added April 2, 2007  (2006 from Peter Suber's SPARC Open Access Newsletter (SOAN)
OpenDOAR # repositories 2,619 66 3% 350 15%
Registry of Open Access Repositories (ROAR)  http://roar.eprints.org/ # repositories
ROAR # repositories 3,621
BASE:  Bielefeld Academic Search Engine http://www.base-search.net/  (note)
# of documents (BASE) 59,953,450 3,237,029 6% 16,410,772 38%
# of content providers (BASE) 2,910 122 4% 406 16%
PubMedCentral  http://www.pubmedcentral.nih.gov/  
# items Dec. 2011 - posted on PMC website(from ROAR) 100% fulltext - for historical purposes - for more accurate data, see PMC Free tab 3,000,000 100,000 3% 400,000 15%
# journals participating in PMC (from PMC website) * PMC1 *2004 Tim Gray
# journals actively participating in PMC (total minus predecessor minus no new content) 1,769 79 5% 282 19%
# journals in PMC with immediate free access 1,252 64 5% 49 4%
# journals in PMC with all articles open access 1,070 49 5% 94 10%
# journals in PMC with some articles open access 310 23 8% 30 11%
# journals that deposit ALL articles in PMC (from PMC website - full participation journals) 1,462 68 5% 229 19%
# journals that deposit NIH-funded articles in PMC (from PMC website - NIH portfolio journals) 281 8 3% 27 11%
# journals that deposit selected articles in PMC (from PMC website) 2,506 92 4% 422 20%
arXiv  http://arxiv.org/  926,535 23,866 3% 93,676 11%
RePEC http://repec.org/ total items (from LogEC as of March 2012) (Sept. 2013 note) 1,510,688 28,720 2%
RePEC online (fulltext) (downloadable as of March 2012) 1,368,765 27,333 2%
Social Sciences Research Network http://papers.ssrn.com/sol3/DisplayAbstractSearch.cfm
Abstracts (SSRN) 540,025 17,179 3% 65,172 14%
Full text papers (SSRN) 442,928 14,592 3% 57,090 15%
Authors (SSRN) 250,824 8,016 3% 28,948 13%
Papers received in last 12 months (SSRN) 66,769 401 1% -376 -1%
Paper downloads - to date (SSRN) 74,367,932 2,464,964 3% 10,308,673 16%
Paper downloads - last 12 months (SSRN) 10,313,690 -597,001 -5% -1,072,072 -9%
Paper downloads - last 30 days (SSRN) 852,445 74,144 10% -266,148 -24%
Open Access Mandate Policies based on ROARMAP http://www.eprints.org/openaccess/policysignup/
Sub-Institutional (was Departmental) Policies (ROARMAP) 36
Funder Policies (ROARMAP) 80
Institutional Policies (ROARMAP) 165
Multi-institutional Policies (ROARMAP) 4
Thesis Policies (ROARMAP) 100
Total Policies (ROARMAP) 385
Proposed Mandates Policies (ROARMAP) 27
Internet Archive http://archive.org/index.php
Webpages (Internet Archive) (in billions) 402 28 7% 121 43%
Moving images (movies)  (Internet Archive) 1,585,064 85,753 6% 398,536 34%
Live music archive (concerts) (Internet Archive) 126,466 2,944 2% 12,229 11%
Audio (recordings)  (Internet Archive) 1,930,400 111,487 6% 360,098 23%
Texts  (Internet Archive) 6,028,983 360,035 6% 1,631,709 37%
SCOAP3 respository (proejct start date January 1, 2014) (beta) 1,071
 
 
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series