Today is the 6th birthday of the Budapest Open Access Initiative, an early defining moment in the open access movement.
Much has happened since February 14, 2002. Thousands of journals have converted to open access, or begun anew as OA, and the DOAJ list was developed to help us keep track. More than a thousand of these journals use the open source Open Journal Systems, developed by the Public Knowledge Project. There are more than a million free items in PubMedCentral, the world's largest open access archive, and more than a thousand open access archives tracked by OpenDOAR. Funding agencies, universities, and now faculty (with thanks to Harvard) are developing open access policies, tracked by Sherpa Juliet.
The growth of open access in the past few years has been nothing short of phenomal.
In my last (December 2007) update of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access, I hinted that the growth rate as measure by DOAJ appeared to be accelerating.
Today, it is my great pleasure to confirm this trend. As of today, DOAJ has added 136 titles in the last 30 days, a growth rate of 4.5 titles per calendar day; a significant increase in growth from last year's already amazing rate of 1.4 titles per calendar day.
Let me join Peter Suber in wishing everyone in the open access movement a happy BOAI Birthday - and Valentine's Day!
