This is a read only archive of pad.okfn.org. See the shutdown announcement for details.

• Juan J. Jimenez-Anca (@juanofmany, juan@encremento.com)
• Michelle Brook (@MLBrook)
• Bjoern Brembs (@brembs, bjoern@brembs.net)
• Heather Morrison (@hgmorrison)

• Ross Mounce (@rmounce)
• Abby Clobridge (@aclobridge)
• Rayna (@maliciarogue)
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• what do you mean by a potential data expedition on scholarly publishing incom "
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• Samir Hachani
• sam_hac1@yahoo.fr

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• Sander van der Waal (@sandervdwaal) - You hear these statements with figures bouncing around like "research community spends $10b dollars per year on publishing". Having those figures substantiated and made insightful would help the OA debate greatly. I'd be keen for outpus from such a data expedition to be made part of something bigger and more sustainable like access.okfn.org
• A lot of relevant work has already been done (e.g. the Houghton studies, STM Annual reports). Even if this is not data it might be useful to have a shared bibliography to avoid re-creating the wheel. Also a list of pointers to resources, e.g. the financial reports of commercial publishers. The Open Access Directory would be a suitable place for keeping this information if the group agrees. (@hgmorrison)
• I am beginning to explore the impact of taking all of this revenue out of the universities and research institutes on academic positions. As a qualitative example, it makes me hopping mad to know that colleagues in my first alma mater, University of Alberta, this year took on voluntary severances due to deep cuts, when I'm pretty sure that none of the large publishers took so much as a slight dip in their profit levels or even their increases for next year from this institution. EBSCO tells us to expect 6-8% price increases for journals next year. An 8% increase on a one-million dollar subscription package (if U of A is like similar institutions, their Elsevier subscriptions are likely much higher than this) is $160,000 - enough to fund one senior faculty position, two junior positions, or substantial funding for dozens of students. In essence - no one is doing this on purpose - academics are giving up their jobs so that some of the big commercial publishers can push the profit margin up from 37.5% to say 37.50001%. I've posted some of this analysis here: http://www.ruor.uottawa.ca/en/handle/10393/26266 and encourage others to work on this line as well. (@hgmorrison)
• In the Open Access Directory Research in Progress page I've listed two projects that are related to this topic: open access article processing charges (with Stephen Pinfield) and resource requirements for small scholar-led open access publishing (just qualitative in this phase) (@hgmorrison)
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• Elsevier: £724m on revenue of £2b — 36%
• Springer‘s Science+Business Media: £294m on revenue of £866m — 33.9%
• John Wiley & Sons: $106m on revenue of $253m — 42%
• Academic division of Informa plc: £47m on revenue of £145m — 32.4%"

1. Do you think this is a suitable topic for exploration?
2. What are the thoughts of those who have run data expeditions or spending stories type projects before? 
3. Does anyone feel strongly about this and would like to coordinate the project?
4. Would anyone like to help out? (could you host a workshop, are you organising an event or conference where this could run as a session, are you a data wrangler, visualisation expert, journalist, coder, accountant, researcher or anybody just interested in digging in?)