Open Access continues to show dramatic growth, by any measure!
In this quarter alone:
Scientific Commons added 1.3 million items, and more than a quarter of a million authors!
OpenDOAR added more than 100 new repositories, and now boasts over 1,100 listings!
The most remarkable story of the quarter, though, is an apparent acceleration of growth of open access publishing, as measured by the number of titles in the Directory of Open Access Journals (DOAJ). There was a net growth of 271 titles in DOAJ in the first quarter of 2008, an average of just under 3 titles per day, up considerably from last year's average of 1.4 titles per day.
The emergence of new open access publisher Bentham Open was definitely a factor in this acceleration; however, even if all 43 Bentham titles presently in DOAJ are eliminated, there is still a net increase of 228 titles this quarter, or an average of 2.5 titles per day, close to double the growth rate of 2007.
At this rate, about the end of the next quarter, OA publishing will reach another milestone: 15% of scholarly peer-reviewed journals will be fully open access (conservative, based on estimate of 20-25,000 peer-reviewed journals in the world).
In the next quarter, the numbers to watch will be PubMedCentral, with the NIH policy requiring, rather than requesting, open access to NIH-funded research as of April 7, 2008. To prepare for the fun, I've collected a few baseline numbers; 13% of cancer literature in PubMed, for example, links to free fulltext; 7% of cancer literature is free immediately on publication! There are 410 journals voluntarily participating in PubMedCentral; 321, or 78%, are available in PubMed immediately on publication.
For full data, see the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Open Data Edition
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series
For those seriously interested in keeping track of the numbers,
Chris Keene has created a site to track the growth of UK repository records (thanks to Peter Suber on Open Access News).
