In brief: best guesstimate - there are approximately 70 million OA documents today (subset of BASE's 115 million, about 60% OA), with OA documents at BASE growing at a rate of about 1,800 OA documents per day. Where do these come from? Thousands of OA archives - with PubMedCentral the largest by far at 4.5 million articles and active participation by thousands of journals. This quarter by the numbers the DOAJ team set a new record with a net growth of 689 journals of 7.7 titles per day. However, percentage wise the most remarkable quarterly growth was all about archives, with BioRxiv and SocRXiv topping the growth list by percentage, and as usual several sections of Internet Archive well up on the growth list. On an annual basis, Directory of Open Access Books was the fastest growing in terms of both # of books and # of publishers.
To download the raw data, go to the DGOA dataverse.
Detail
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE), in addition to a great OA search engine, provides the best (if rough) guesstimate of how much we are achieving
together, added 2.7 million documents this quarter for a total of 115
million. About 60% of the content in BASE is OA, so this is roughly
growth of 160,000 open access items over the past quarter, or about
1,800 documents per day, with a total of about 6.9 million open access
documents.
10,114 titles. As the chart shows, growth in DOAJ at the searchable article level is particularly remarkable, growing from just over 60,000 in 2004 to close to 2.5 million articles today. Over at PubMedCentral there are now 4.5 million documents with close to 7 thousand journals actively contributing content.
By the percentages, it was a particularly good quarter for open access archives. Newcomers bioRxiv and SocArXiv top the quarterly growth by percentage with growth rates of 25% for bioRxiv (equivalent to doubling in a year) and 22% for SocArXiv (just under doubling in a year). bioRxiv now has 15,000 preprints, SocArXiv close to 1,500. As usual growth at Internet Archive was very impressive, 14% growth in texts (now 14.5 million free texts), 12% growth in the recently added collections category (now close to 300,000 collections) and 9% growth in software (close to 200,000). The RePEC book collection grew by 12% to over 33,000*.
On an annual basis by percentage, Directory of Open Access Books is at the top for growth both in # of books (65% growth, now close to 9,000 titles) and # of publishers (40% growth, 225 publishers). BASE continues to amaze with a 23% increase in content providers over the past year (edging up towards 6,000), and 15% growth in content (now at 115 million documents).
* The RePEC book chapter category also showed amazing growth, but perhaps this is an artefact due to a recent clean-up project as numbers were significantly down last quarter.
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.
