From: Kent Anderson <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Fri, 30 Oct 2020 09:44:25 -0400

This paper can be plausibly viewed as part of a commercial effort to promote the database the author’s entity — an LLC, not a non-profit — sells. There have been two preprints on SocArXiv (https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/vznty and https://doi.org/10.31235/osf.io/gcr32 [the precursor to the one you’ve pointed out]) out of this database this year, as well as this Early Access work in QSS. In all three, the author’s own commercial database was used for the analysis. It is sold on a subscription basis, and a note here (https://provost.ku.edu/memos/20190918) suggests that for the University of Kansas, the annual price was $238,000. So, there’s a lot of money on the table for the author and potential benefit for promoting the underlying database.

The disclosures read, "Both authors are employed by Academic Analytics, LLC. Academic Analytics, LLC management had no oversight or involvement in the project and were not involved in preparation or review of the manuscript.” Yet, since the lead author is the Director of Academic Analytics Research Center, and his co-author is the Product Manager at Academic Analytics, I find this disclosure to be misleading and disingenuous. The Director is the lead author and the Product Manager is the co-author, yet they choose to use language in their disclosure that “Academic Analytics, LLC management had to oversight or involvement”? 

MIT Press should address this misleading disclosure before final publication of this paper.

On top of the potential for this paper to be simply a marketing exercise at some level, the findings aren’t very interesting or unexpected. Critical observers of the OA space have been saying for years that the Gold OA APC model was inevitably going to favor incumbent scholars with research grants, and in the world now, “incumbent” unpacks to older and male. 

I’d also dispute the assertion that Gold APC papers from older, male academics at big universities are what those “around the world will be most likely interested in reading.” Older, tenured scholars have admitted again and again that the papers they publish in Gold OA journals are often the ones they would have kept in their desk drawers before, because they weren’t likely to get into a specialist or top journal. Prestige isn't quality, novelty, or utility. Just because someone has a big name doesn’t mean everything that drops from their figurative pen is a treasure. So, it’s just as plausible that the Gold OA output from these authors is a bunch of cast-off ideas, weaker studies, speculative derivative works, etc. Measuring subsequent citations would be something to start with, comparing these to the median in each specialty and with the authors’ other works. I wonder if Academic Analytics LLC will produce such a paper once their quarter-million-dollar-per-university database has such data? And then try to deceive us about their own commercial interests in the work?

Kent Anderson
Caldera Publishing Solutions and “The Geyser”


Kent Anderson
Founder
Caldera Publishing Solutions
290 Turnpike Road, #366
Westborough, MA   01581-2843
774-288-9464

Writing at “The Geyser"

On Oct 29, 2020, at 8:05 PM, LIBLICENSE <[log in to unmask]> wrote:

From: "Jim O'Donnell" <[log in to unmask]>
Date: Thu, 29 Oct 2020 16:48:15 -0700

Here is an article that will set the cat among the pigeons and the
pigeons a-twittering.  Written from the Academic Analytics Research
Center in Columbus, the article undertakes a careful statistical study
of 182,000 authors of articles published Open Access with Article
Processing Charges, to determine the demographics of this important
slice of OA authorship.  The blunt conclusion is that authors of such
articles are likely to be more male, more senior, with more federal
research funding, and housed in more prestigious (indeed more likely
private) institutions.  Read that way, it says that publishing OA is a
privilege for the privileged.

But this is paradoxical territory.  What it also says is that the
articles being published OA with APCs are more likely to be articles
that readers without privilege around the world will be most likely
interested in reading.  Read in this way, this article says that OA
with APCs is opening up precisely the materials that should be most
readily available that way.   The article itself is OA.   Details,
DOI, and abstract below.

Jim O'Donnell
ASU

A. Olejniczak and M.J. Wilson, "Who’s writing open access (OA)
articles? Characteristics of OA authors at Ph.D.-granting institutions
in the United States," posted 10/7/20 in *Quantitative Science
Studies* (MIT Press):  https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00091

abstract

The open access (OA) publication movement aims to present research
literature to the public at no cost and with no restrictions. While
the democratization of access to scholarly literature is a primary
focus of the movement, it remains unclear whether OA has uniformly
democratized the corpus of freely available research, or whether
authors who choose to publish in OA venues represent a particular
subset of scholars—those with access to resources enabling them to
afford article processing charges (APCs). We investigated the number
of OA articles with article processing charges (APC OA) authored by
182,320 scholars with known demographic and institutional
characteristics at American research universities across 11 broad
fields of study. The results show, in general, that the likelihood for
a scholar to author an APC OA article increases with male gender,
employment at a prestigious institution (AAU member universities),
association with a STEM discipline, greater federal research funding,
and more advanced career stage (i.e., higher professorial rank).
Participation in APC OA publishing appears to be skewed toward
scholars with greater access to resources and job security.