@eschares@scholar.social

· 9mo ago

Very excited to announce that I have been awarded a 3-year grant from the Alfred P. Sloan Foundation to study the economics of the academic publishing market!

Analysis will include hybrid journal subscription prices and daily APC price changes.

More to come in 2026.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 9mo ago

Happy to be quoted in this overview looking at the complex problem of who pays for scientific #publishing.

Appearing with @juancommander@mastodon.social , @csmarcum@sciences.social , and @Samuelmoore@hcommons.social

https://undark.org/2026/01/07/apc-science-publishing/

@Undark@mastodon.social

scholar.social

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 35mo ago

Terrific article (and dataset) out now @QSS_ISSI@scicomm.xyz showing just how much the Big 5 publishers made from #APCs over four years - $1.06 Billion!

Also clearly lays out how different publishers pursue different strategies - "Elsevier and Wiley mak[e] most APC revenue from hybrid fees and others focus on gold."

Big congrats to the team! @stefhaustein@fediscience.org @leighbutler@mastodon.social https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00272

scholar.social

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 11mo ago

@csmarcum@sciences.social wow, mind blown! I’ve been daydreaming about all the cool studies that could be done with that data.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 26mo ago

Replying to

Another great collaboration with colleagues at the #ScholCommLab: @stefhaustein@fediscience.org @juancommander@mastodon.social @leighbutler@mastodon.social , Maddie, and Nina APC dataset: >36,000 data points from 8,712 journals by six publishers, 2019-2023. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/CR1MMV

doi.org

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 36mo ago

It was great to attend the @sti2023@social.cwts.nl conference last week. The whole experience was fantastic, but one of the highlights was getting to meet @LudoWaltman@social.cwts.nl in person!

Here you see our "Sweatshirt Diplomacy" based on this summer's USA-NED Women's World Cup game. Ended in a tie, so we both had to wear the other's shirt.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 16mo ago

Replying to

I think often when doing lots of data analysis or programming in particular, it's typical to try and speed things up. Do lots of stuff in parallel, go faster, be more efficient. But doing something with my hands, esp something I'm not even particularly good at, goes against a lot of those habits. I was once searching for landscaping rocks in my grass so I could pick them up and mow the yard. After scanning for a few seconds I thought, I should just do a CTRL-F. That was a wakeup call.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 17mo ago

@hauschke@mastodon.social Ah yes, it works for me now as well. It hadn't for two hours prior!

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 17mo ago

I'm proud to report that after a 2nd place finish last year, WE WON this year's Cy's House of Trivia competition!! 🎉

100 teams of 8 on the floor of Hilton Coliseum, answering 80 questions (with a heavy lean toward Cyclone athletics). I join a family friend's team and chip in more general knowledge.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 26mo ago

Replying to

@rlmcelreath Gearing up for RAGBRAI here - a week long bike ride (not race) across the state of Iowa.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 42mo ago

Replying to

@philipncohen@mastodon.social @LudoWaltman@social.cwts.nl I see, thanks. The graphs only have the top 500 of (publisher/journal/uni), based on total number of US FF pubs over past 5 years. The journals you searched for didn't crack the top 500, but still in the total 1.3M count. It would take additional work to extend the graphs past the top 500. The research categories are top 10, again of US FF research. Here are the top 22.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 33mo ago

Replying to

@LudoWaltman @cwts Great summary!

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 40mo ago

A nice shoutout from Digital Science today on my #OSTP article:

Shoutout to Eric Schares
@eschares@scholar.social for using
@DSDimensions
data in his paper on the Nelson #OSTP Memo! 🤩🙌

We've summarized Eric's paper on the Dimensions site: https://ow.ly/wXZz50OUK77 👈

See the full paper on
@themitpress@mastodon.mit.edu
@QSS_ISSI@scicomm.xyz here: https://doi.org/10.1162/qss_a_00237 👈

scholar.social

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 42mo ago

Replying to

@philipncohen@mastodon.social @LudoWaltman@social.cwts.nl @academicchatter@a.gup.pe Interestingly, I still haven't gotten a notification from your mention or your hashtag (I monitor #ostp). I only knew about this post because of the Altmetric alert from Twitter.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 17mo ago

Replying to

@hauschke@mastodon.social Error code 500

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 18mo ago

Replying to

Problem: when negotiating OA agreements, libraries and publishers need to the predict number of publications in future years. Current ways of averaging or trendlines can be inaccurate, causing credits to run out mid-year. Our model takes 5 years of journal-level corresponding authored pub counts and predicts the distr of articles in year n+1 using Poisson, pooling info across journals. Article counts are by jnl-year, then summed to predict a total distr with uncertainty beyond a point estimate.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 18mo ago

Replying to

We test on three real datasets of counts from ISU and show more accurate predictions for one of the case studies and similar for a second. For the 3rd, the actual count was significantly lower than any previous year, and no method predicts well.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 18mo ago

Replying to

We also combine the predicted distribution of counts per journal with the journal-specific Article Processing Charge (APC) to get an expected cost. This can be useful to estimate deposit accounts, for example. We used actual publisher APC lists for this, but the Butler APC dataset would be good too. https://doi.org/10.7910/DVN/CR1MMV

doi.org

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 18mo ago

Replying to

Note: we estimate the total number of papers that might be expected under an OA agreement. More work to estimate the actual number that ultimately are. Author OA opt-in rates vary by institution and publisher, which can be applied directly to these expected counts. However local opt-in rates can NOT be directly applied to APC calculations, since the individual journal matters. If uptake is high in journals with $$ APCs, total cost will be higher than if that uptake was low.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 18mo ago

Replying to

This paper has been in the works for a long time (2021), and I’m happy for it to finally see the light of day. This is the research idea that sent me down the rabbit hole of learning more about Bayesian statistics and causal inference, and McElreath's Rethinking content in particular.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 18mo ago

Replying to

Libraries need to develop the ability to analyze bibliometric data, estimate output, and engage on a more equal footing with publishers. We hope this will be another tool to use any negotiations. The article is now published OA in JASIST. The R code and Wiley dataset are openly available at https://doi.org/10.25380/iastate.22250182

doi.org

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 42mo ago

Replying to

@philipncohen@mastodon.social @LudoWaltman@social.cwts.nl Does Maryland have access to Dimensions? If so, I'd be glad to show you how to run the analysis yourself so you can search for the journal titles of interest to you.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 32mo ago

Replying to

@vtraag @tklebel Congratulations! I will give this a close read. It fits exteremely well with the Statistical Rethinking course I am currently taking with @rlmcelreath

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 11mo ago

@csmarcum@sciences.social is this related to data accessed through an FSRDC? We just got one here at Iowa State.

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 42mo ago

Replying to

@czimm_economist@econtwitter.net Great suggestion! See the second graph of each pair - by percentage. https://ostp.lib.iastate.edu/

ostp.lib.iastate.edu

Streamlit

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Eric Schares @eschares@scholar.social

· 42mo ago

Replying to

@philipncohen@mastodon.social @LudoWaltman@social.cwts.nl @academicchatter@a.gup.pe Thanks for your interest! Can you tell me more about "excludes social sciences wo explanation"? Is there something you expect to see that isn't there? The 1.3M total count over 5 years is of all papers, including social sciences, that acknowledge US FF in Dimensions. If you mean the interactive charts, yes, the lower left corner is missing data points bc of the way Dimensions exports data (top 500 of whatever you're filtering by).

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