2009: a great year for OA!While dramatic growth continues in all aspects of open access, the story of the year and especially of the last quarter is a dramatic leap in open access mandate policies, particularly institutional and departmental policies. In the past year, institutional mandates (as recorded on ROARMAP) more than tripled, from 25 to 79. Nearly half that growth has come in the past week, from just one country - Finland, with its recent announcement of open access mandate policies at all 26 of Finland's applied sciences universities, as reported by Peter Suber on Open Access News. Update Dec. 13: Alma Swan has updated her chart on OA mandate growth. Note that our numbers are slightly different, as I include thesis mandates in the total, and Alma doesn't.
Strong growth continues in open access journals. The Directory of Open Access Journals, currently at 4,400 titles, added more than 700 titles in the past year, or about 2 titles per day.
There is plenty of holiday reading in all of those more than 1,500 repositories as recorded by OpenDOAR. Scientific Commons, now over 32 million publications, grew by more than 8 million items in 2009; that's more than 20 thousand publications per day.Update December 15: BASE may now be the largest search engine in terms of repositories; see this chart for BASE numbers (thanks to Dirk Pieper).
E-LIS, the Open Archive for Library and Information Studies, recently surpassed an important milestone of over 10,000 items.
The percentage of NIH-funded research that is freely available after 2 years is 41% for external researchers and 50% for internal researchers. This is definitely growing; but the figure should be 100% at 1 year, should it not? This issue of Dramatic Growth illustrates, in a small way, how we can begin to figure out who has been naughty and who has been nice, to help authors meet this simple requirement of our generous research funders.
Here are some quick figures for OA compliance rates with the Public Access Policy for a few journals. Note that this is not a representative sampling, rather just a few titles selected at random from the publishers' websites:
Here are some quick figures for OA compliance rates with the Public Access Policy for a few journals. Note that this is not a representative sampling, rather just a few titles selected at random from the publishers' websites:
- PLoS Medicine: 100%
- BMC Cancer: 100%
- American Journal of Epidemiology: 95%
- Addictive Behaviors (Elsevier): 37%
- American Heart Journal (Elsevier): 22%
- Annals of Surgical Oncology (Springer): 12%
- Breast Cancer Research and Treatment (Springer): 9%
One thing to look forward to in 2010 is a very strong probably that the world's largest scholarly journal will be an open access journal, the award-winning PLoS One. OA mandate mania is sure to continue ~ not only are discussions underway at many a university and department, but now that we have a substantial and growing set of role models the benefits of an OA mandate ~ such as increased impact and web presence ~ will become that much more obvious, inspiring yet more mandates. FRPAA is on the list for a U.S. rapidly moving towards open government on many fronts.
There is no need to wait for New Year's to make your resolutions; why not join the Compact for Open Access Publishing Equity today?
To everyone who has worked hard for open access all year long ~ those with visible achievements to show, and those with quieter progress alike ~ kudos, thanks for all that you do, and best wishes for a wonderful holiday.
Open Data editions of Dramatic Growth of Open Access:
DGOA Dataverse (courtesy of Harvard)
Google docs for viewing (thanks, Google!)
Google docs full data version
Google Docs Show Growth Edition
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.
