My Dramatic Growth of Open Access: Open Data Edition has been updated with today's numbers. For analysis of growth of OA in 2007 and predictions for 2008, see my Dramatic Growth of Open Access: 2007 (Interim) and Predictions for 2008, and my Minor Update.
One notable story for the latter half of December is the continuing very strong recent growth in the Directory of Open Access Journals, with 64 new titles added in the past 30 days; an average of more than 2 per calendar day, higher than their 2007 overall growth rate of 1.4 per calendar day.
As reported earlier, public access to the results of research funded by the U.S. National Institutes of Health, the world's largest medical research funder, is now law. This is a substantial addition to the medical research open access mandates, which include pioneer Wellcome Trust, U.K. Medical Research Council, the Canadian Institutes of Health Research, and the Howard Hughes Medical Institute, among others. For details on research funders' open access policies, see the Sherpa JULIET list. Based on these mandates, my prediction is that increasing growth in PubMedCentral will be one of interesting areas to watch through the period 2008 - 2010. The time lag in seeing the full effects of the mandates reflects the time it takes to confirm research funding, conduct the research, publish the results, and in some cases, embargo periods.
The implications of the NIH public access mandate go beyond medicine, however. The US Congress and Senate have approved the first US public access mandate, in spite of intense lobbying efforts against public access. Watch for more public access / open access mandates, in the US and elsewhere, in 2008.
