RE: Springer Open Choice uptake affects 2011 journal pricing

["Bill Hooker" <cwhooker@fastmail.fm>]

> I do not know how the Kaufman-Wills
> figure in the calculation referred to

Briefly, the study found that "...more than half of DOAJ [Open Access]
journals did not charge author-side fees of any type, whereas more than
75% of ALPSP, AAMC, and HW subset [Toll Access] journals did charge
author-side fees."  There were around 250 journals in each (OA and TA)
subset.


> At no stage did I publish a journal that levied page charges.
[...]
> I have just checked with people in two very large publishers
> among the top four in terms of size - and quality - in scholarly
> publishing.

I think that leaves less than half of the STM market.  I had a quick
look back at my own "study" and sure enough, all the journals I actually
looked at are Science/NPG/Cell/PNAS and society journals.

So what of the NIH estimate that they spend $100 million per year on
author-side charges, in support of some 80,000 manuscripts?  (Sources:
1, 2 below -- the sources for those figures aren't great -- I wonder if
the NIH has anything better?  I can't get parts of their site to load at
the moment.)  If that's even remotely accurate there must be a subset of
TA journals charging very high author-side fees indeed.


> Some journals did
> levy colour charges (colour is optional)

This is something of a side note, but for a good many biomed papers,
colour is not optional.