Tuesday, January 10, 2012

Illustrations of the global reach of the open access movement

These two charts illustrate the global reach of the open access movement. The first chart illustrates the regional breakdown of the 7,385 journals listed in the Directory of Open Access Journals. Please see below for citation information. The second chart below is from OpenDOAR, illustrating the regional breakdown of open access repositories. Note that the percentages are roughly in the same ballpark for Europe (highest percentage, 40% range) and North America (second highest percentage, 20% range), while South America ranks third for open access journals and Asia for open access repositories. As further research, it might be interesting to compare these percentages with GDP or number of researchers. With a superficial glance, it looks to me like everyone around the world is contributing roughly their fair share of open access.

Citation & permissions

The OpenDOAR chart is a January 11, 2012 snapshot of this live updated chart, copied here for comparison purposes with the verbal permission of Peter Millington from a couple of years ago. Please cite OpenDOAR and see the OpenDOAR site / project for permissions. The DOAJ chart was developed from the DOAJ country statistics. As of January 10, 2012 (my time / note OpenDOAR is in a different time zone), DOAJ lists 117 countries. The chart and comments are my own, developed for my thesis. Please cite: Morrison, Heather (2012). Freedom for scholarship in the internet age. PhD Thesis (in progress). Retrieved from: http://pages.cmns.sfu.ca/heather-morrison/

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.