Dramatic Growth of Open Access: June 30, 2009

OpenDOAR's Peter Millington explains the numbers and how to insert charts that automatically update with OpenDOAR data, like the one below (it's easy - just copy & paste a URL!) to IJPE author Heather Morrison at the OAI6 conference. Photo courtesy of Elena Giglia.

Highlights

Growth in open access policies was highly significant this quarter; the number of departmental policies in particular, doubled in the last few months from 6 to 13. There are now well over a hundred open access policies, and many more in the works, such as the recently re-introduced U.S. Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA). PLoS One is now one of the world's largest journals, anticipating publication of 4,800 articles in 2009 - and more in 2010; PLoS One may well become THE largest journal sometime in 2010. DOAJ added 253 journals; OpenDOAR and OAIster each added 43 new repositories, for a total of over 1,400 repositories facilitating access to about 22-27 million items, a distributed collection growing by at least 17,000 items per day. Both free and open access are growing steadily at PubMedCentral; the percentage of publications based on NIH-funded research that are freely available within 2 years of publication is up to 35%. Watch for this percentage to grow over the coming year as more articles pass the maximum 12-month embargo allowed under the policy which came into effect April 2008. 98 more journals are making articles not just freely accessible, but open access, this quarter in PubMedCentral, for a total of 398 OA journals in PMC.

Details

This quarter has seen significant growth in open access policies; the number of departmental policies has more than doubled in the past quarter alone, from 6 to 13. There are now well over 100 open access policies; and many more in the works.

PLoS One is rapidly becoming the world's single largest journal; PLoS One anticipates publishing about 4,800 journals in 2009, and more in 2010. [Thanks to Peter Binfield, PloS One Editor]. There are only a handful of journals in the world publishing numbers of articles in this range.

Strong growth continues in both open access publishing and open access archives. DOAJ added 253 titles this quarter, for a total of 4,252 journals. Note that not all new additions to DOAJ are new journals; one of the recently added titles to DOAJ, Revista de Administração de Empresas, has a start year of 1961.

OpenDOAR is a vetted list of open access repositories, and the largest list with over 1,400 repositories listed. Both OAIster and OpenDOAR added 43 new repositories this quarter. An OAIster search grew by more than 1.6 million items this quarter, over 17,000 items per day.

OpenDOAR has a tool that makes it easy to insert any one of a number of automatically updated charts illustrating OpenDOAR data, like the one below. It's easy - all you have to do is to copy and paste a URL!




At PubMed, both free and open access are steadily growing. 35% of NIH externally funded publications are now freely available within 2 years of publication, a 5% increase in compliance over the last year. Expect to see this number rise over the coming year as more articles pass the 12-month embargo permitted under the mandate policy that came into effect April 2008. The percentage of NIH-funded research of any age that is freely available has grown to 40%, up from 34% a year ago, suggesting that researchers are making not only new, but also older publications stemming from NIH publications freely accessible. New data from NIH has made it possible to provide a more accurate figure for the number of journals voluntarily participating in PMC, 615 (omitting predecessor journals and journals no longer providing new content). The number of journals providing immediate free access through PMC has increased by 41, for a total of 488; the number of journals providing open access through PMC has increased by 92, for a total of 398.

Google docs version for viewing (showing growth): http://spreadsheets.google.com/pub?key=rz-5IhC4cgjvMde2AQtsHXg&output=html

Open Data Edition for viewing: http://spreadsheets.google.com/ccc?key=runrJbg1UlCuDK-2RipnAaA

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

Two OA chapters of Scholarly Communication for Librarians (in press)

Two chapters of my book, Scholarly Communication for Librarians, in press at Chandos / Woodhouse Publishing, are now available for open access in E-LIS.

The two chapters are:

Open Access

In-depth overview of open access, covering definitions (open access publishing, open access archives, gratis and libre, open access works versus open access processes), major statements and declarations, types of open access, major initiatives, trends, advocacy and lobbying.

Summary and Conclusions

Summary and Conclusions of Scholarly Communication for Librarians, a book designed to provide librarians at all levels with the basics of how scholarly communication works, an understanding of the academic library as an essential support for scholarly communication, the impact of the decisions librarians make, and emerging roles for libraries and librarians in scholarly communication. Includes major points from all chapters, on: scholarship, scholarly journals, the scholarly publishing industry, librarianship and scholarly communication, author's rights, open access, the economics of scholarly communication, and emerging trends.

Comment: why would an ardent open access advocate publish a book that is only partially open access? One reason is simply that monographs are of interest, but not the primary focus of the open access movement; the arguments for open access for books are a bit different than for the journal articles that articles traditionally given away. The other reason is that when I started the book, the market did not appear to be quite ready for open access books. Soon, this situation will change; the official launch of Open Monographs Press is expected at the July Public Knowledge Project in Vancouver this July, for example. The flexibility of Chandos, a publisher with a well-established reputation, in allowing for two open access chapters is appreciated.


If you're interested in purchasing a copy of the book, ordering information is availablehere.