Closed access book chapters, Bookmetrix, and job creations

Enjoying my Saturday morning (you'll can actually track down that I write more blog posts then, than any other time of the week) with a coffee (no, not beer, Christoph ^[1]). Wanted to complete my Scholia profile ^[2] (gree work by Finn, arxiv:1703.04222 ^[3], happy to have contributes ideas and small patches) a bit more (or perhaps that of the Journal of Cheminformatics ^[4]), as that relaxes me, and nicely complements rerunning some Bioclipse ^[5] scripts to add metabolite/compound data to Wikidata ^[6] (e.g. this post ^[7]). Because this afternoon I want to do some serious work, like write up outlines for a few cool grant applications. And if lucky, I may be able to do a bit of work on this below-the-radar project.

So, I started updating a full work available at ^[8] for a peer-reviewed IEEE paper (doi:10.1109/BIBM.2014.6999367 ^[9]), as it is not old Open Access, and I have to rely on green Open Access. Then I headed over to my ImpactStory profile ^[10] and ran into a closed Open Access book chapter with Tony, Sean, and Ola (doi:10.1007/978-1-62703-050-2_10 ^[11]). But I have no idea if I can put online a green Open Access version of this book chapter.

Now, why I am blogging this (and meanwhile, adding four new DTXSIDs to Wikidata ^[12]), is two observiations. First, I had not blogged about Bookmetrix yet, a cool project that reports the impact of book chapters. The ROI on writing book chapters I always considered as not so high, but then I saw the #altmetrics for this chapter:

Five citations is not that lot, but considering I do not cite book chapter much either. But look at that number of downloads, 2.39 thousand! Wow!

But there is another angle to that. We regularly report our societal impact, nowadays. It's part of the Dutch Standard Evaluation Protocol, or at least selected by our research institute as something to assess researchers on. Hang on, no, citations is not part of that category. But this is: the paper is sold for about 50 euro. Seriously? Yes, seriously. And apparently 2.39K people bought this chapter. I am not sure if I need to assume that this is mostly people buying the full book, which means the chapter is a lot cheaper. But the full book reports download numbers of above 50 thousand, so it seems not. Now, let's assume that a good part of the bought copies is via package deals and the average payment is half. That may sound high, but we ignore the 50k download for the full book to compensate for that.

Doing that math means that our joint book chapter contributed 60k euro to the European market. That's a full job the four of us created with this single book chapter. I'm impressed.