On June 30th, I reported that OAIster had grown by more than half a million records in the previous quarter, for a total of 7.6 million records, and predicted that OAIster would exceed a billion records sometime in 2007.
The pace of growth in the past few weeks has been dramatic indeed - OAIster now lists 8,754,367 records from 668 institutions - growth of more than a million records in less than 3 weeks.
At this rate, an OAIster search will pass the billion mark much, much sooner than expected, likely in 2006.
The list of new institutions harvested recently is long, and impressive.
This post reflects my personal opinion only and does not represent the opinions or policy of the BC Electronic Library Network or the Simon Fraser University Library.
The problem also is growing: to find the OPEN ACCESS pearls in OAIster. There is a lot of non-free material in OAIster (especially after having added the Highwire stuff) and no way to set a limit for free full texts. Highwire itself offers no such limit to filter the free articles. Each institution is filling the "Rights" field in its own manner.
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