Imperial College London

Henry Rzepa

About [two years
ago](http://www.ch.imperial.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/?p=9257 "The demographics of a blog readership."){target="_blank"},
I posted on the distribution of readership of this blog. The passage of
time has increased this from 144 to 176 countries. There are apparently
between 189-196 such, so not quite yet complete coverage!
[![2015](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/2015.jpg){.aligncenter
.size-full .wp-image-13244 decoding="async" width="450"
srcset="https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/2015.jpg 576w, https://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/2015-300x217.jpg 300w"
sizes="(max-width: 576px) 100vw, 576px"}](http://www.ch.ic.ac.uk/rzepa/blog/wp-content/uploads/2015/01/2015.jpg)  
Of course, it is the nature of the beast that whilst we can track
countries, very little else is known about such readerships. Is the
readership young or old, student or professor, chemist or not (although
I fancy the latter is less likely). Another way of keeping tabs on some
of the activity are aggregators such as [Chemical
Blogspace](http://cb.openmolecules.net/posts.php?category=Blue%20Obelisk){target="_blank"},
which has been rather quiet recently. Perhaps we have become too
obsessed by metrics, and with the Internet-of-things apparently the
"next-big-thing", the metrics are only likely to increase. This will
only encourage "***game playing***", and I urge you to see a [prime
example](http://www.timeshighereducation.co.uk/features/ref-2014-rerun-who-are-the-game-players/2017670.article){target="_blank"}
of this in the UK REF (research excellence framework), the measure which
attempts to rank UK universities in terms of their "excellence".

Ah well, I had better leave this blog and go off and check on my h-index
just in case it has notched up another integer.

::: {.wp_orcid_field}
[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
rel="author"}
:::


About two years ago, I posted on the distribution of readership of this blog. The passage of time has increased this from 144 to 176 countries. There are apparently between 189-196 such, so not quite yet complete coverage! Of course, it is the nature of the beast that whilst we can track countries, very little else is known about such readerships.

The demographics of a blog readership &#8211; updated

Increasingly, our access to scientific information is becoming a
research topic in itself. Thus an analysis of big deal journal
bundles\[cite\]10.1073/pnas.1403006111\[/cite\] has attracted much
interesting commentary (including one from a large scientific
publisher\[cite\]10.1038/510447f\[/cite\]). In the UK, our funding
councils have been pro-active in promoting the so-called GOLD publishing
model, where the authors (aided by grants from their own institution or
others) pay the perpetual up-front publication costs (more precisely the
costs demanded by the publishers, which is not necessarily the same
thing) so that their article is removed from the normal subscription pay
wall erected by the publisher and becomes accessible to anyone. As the
proportion of GOLD content increases, it was anticipated (hoped?) that
the costs of accessing the remaining non-GOLD articles *via* a
pay-walled subscription would decrease.

But as was shown\[cite\]10.1073/pnas.1403006111\[/cite\], the publishers
have hitherto arranged for the prices of these subscriptions to be
covered by non-disclosure clauses. Which makes it quite difficult for us
(the readers of these journals, and of course the main sources of their
content as well) to find out if this model is (starting) to actually
work. Certainly, the entire system does not yet appear to be in any sort
of steady state equilibrium; perhaps it never will achieve this in the
current model? For example, although extra funds have been made
available to promote GOLD publishing, these cover only a small fraction
of the total output of a typical research university. One could respond
to this in several ways:

1.  Find the missing funds from somewhere else, which probably means
    less money for the research itself. This of course is the model that
    maintains or increases a publisher's incomes.
2.  Decrease the costs of GOLD publishing. Currently a typical article
    processing charge ranges from £500-5000 depending on the prestige of
    the journal. Is it beyond the realm of possibility that this range
    could change to *eg* £50-500?
3.  Simply persuade everyone to publish less. Perhaps ten times less?
    Every group might be restricted to one or two block-buster articles
    a year, and the rest of their output goes into open repositories? Or
    indeed into blogs! These two options of course are unlikely to
    increase publishers' incomes.

Well, after 350 years of scientific publishing, we appear to have
arrived at a critical point. A cross-roads if you like. But who should
be in charge of deciding what direction is now taken? Should it not be
the very people who create and then "consume" scientific information and
knowledge!

::: {.wp_orcid_field}
[https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390](https://orcid.org/0000-0002-8635-8390){target="_blank"
rel="author"}
:::


Increasingly, our access to scientific information is becoming a research topic in itself.

Rogue Scholar Beiträge

The demographics of a blog readership – updated

The price of information: Evaluating big deal journal bundles