Highlights
There are over 7,000 peer-reviewed fully open access journals as listed in the DOAJ, still growing by 4 titles per day and over 6,000 of these are in English, as listed by Open J-Gate. Electronic Journals Library keeps track of more than 32,000 free journals. There are over 2,000 repositories, linking to more than 30 million items, growing at the rate of 21 thousand items per day, which can be searched through the snazzy new Bielefeld Academic Search Engine search options. PLoS ONE, having become the world's largest journal last year, outdid themselves by doubling the number of articles published this year. PubMedCentral, arXiv, RePEC, and E-LIS growth was in the 10-15% range for the year. This issue of Dramatic Growth adds a new feature, a first attempt at comparing compliance rates with a few medical funders' open access policies - so far, Wellcome Trust is looking good!
Details and commentary
As eloquently explained by Paul Stacey, 2011 was the year of open, or as Katarina Lovrecic suggests, everything OA seems to be coming up roses. Europeana added its 20 millionth item. Creative Commons celebrated its 9th birthday, noting that there are now more than 500 million CC licensed items. Congratulations to PLoS ONE on its 5th birthday. It was only a year ago that PLoS ONE became the world's largest journal. In 2011, PLoS ONE topped off this remarkable accomplishment with one that may be even more astounding, having doubled the number of articles published in 2011 over 2010, for a total of just under 14,000 articles published in 2011. No wonder PLoS ONE has inspired at least 9 clones, as detailed by Mike Eisen.
Caroline Sutton and Peter Suber reported on growth in scholarly society open access publishers in the December 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. The Social Sciences Research Network has a great statistics page featuring numbers such as their 1.3 million plus community, more than 50 million downloads, and over 300 thousand full text papers. That's just a few of the macro level indicators of fabulous open access growth that I happened to notice over the past few weeks!
Some highlights of 2011: this was the year to let the competition begin! and begin to address some of the challenges of success. PMC growth is now about one free fulltext per minute.
Following are a few figures for the year. To download the full data, go to the DGOA Dataverse
For earlier issues of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access and occasional updates, see the DGOA series post.
Just added to the dataverse: a first attempt at comparing % of free fulltext indexed in PubMed by research funder. The method involves searching PubMed for Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural [pt] OR Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural [pt], first with no date limiter, then 3 years, etc. Similar approaches were used with the search terms Research Support, Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Research Support, Wellcome Trust. Comments on the method are welcome, please send an email to hgmorris at sfu dot ca. I wonder if this search approach could be used to compare countries on their relative contributions to medical research in the future? CIHR's total contributions indexed (not just fulltext) were about 85% of what our contribution would be relative to NIH adjusted for population (Canada has about 1/10 the population of the U.S.). IF this method is sound, we're not quite pulling our weight when it comes to medical research in Canada, although we're not as far behind as I thought we might be.
Based on this method, it appears that Wellcome Trust is having the greatest success at compliance with its open access policy, having the highest percentage (62%) at the 3-year mark. Full data can be found in the DGOA Dataverse (Dec. 31, 2011 full data, 3rd tab).
The Directory of Open Access Journals now has over 7,000 titles, having added a net total of 1,436, for a growth rate of 4 titles per day. Even more remarkable is the growth rate in journals and articles searchable at article level. At growth rates of over 40% in the past year, this illustrates that DOAJ titles are growing in functionality as well as numbers.
Open J-Gate provides a listing and search service specific to English-language journals. Open J-Gate now has close to 10,000 journals, of which 6,500 are peer-reviewed. In 2011, Open J-Gate added titles at a rate of over 4 per day.
The Electronic Journals Library tracks free journals regardless of peer-reviewed / immediate open access status. Electronic Journals Library now has more than 32,000 journals, having added over 5,000 in 2011 at a rate of 15 titles per day
There are over 7,000 peer-reviewed fully open access journals as listed in the DOAJ, still growing by 4 titles per day and over 6,000 of these are in English, as listed by Open J-Gate. Electronic Journals Library keeps track of more than 32,000 free journals. There are over 2,000 repositories, linking to more than 30 million items, growing at the rate of 21 thousand items per day, which can be searched through the snazzy new Bielefeld Academic Search Engine search options. PLoS ONE, having become the world's largest journal last year, outdid themselves by doubling the number of articles published this year. PubMedCentral, arXiv, RePEC, and E-LIS growth was in the 10-15% range for the year. This issue of Dramatic Growth adds a new feature, a first attempt at comparing compliance rates with a few medical funders' open access policies - so far, Wellcome Trust is looking good!
Details and commentary
As eloquently explained by Paul Stacey, 2011 was the year of open, or as Katarina Lovrecic suggests, everything OA seems to be coming up roses. Europeana added its 20 millionth item. Creative Commons celebrated its 9th birthday, noting that there are now more than 500 million CC licensed items. Congratulations to PLoS ONE on its 5th birthday. It was only a year ago that PLoS ONE became the world's largest journal. In 2011, PLoS ONE topped off this remarkable accomplishment with one that may be even more astounding, having doubled the number of articles published in 2011 over 2010, for a total of just under 14,000 articles published in 2011. No wonder PLoS ONE has inspired at least 9 clones, as detailed by Mike Eisen.
Caroline Sutton and Peter Suber reported on growth in scholarly society open access publishers in the December 2011 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. The Social Sciences Research Network has a great statistics page featuring numbers such as their 1.3 million plus community, more than 50 million downloads, and over 300 thousand full text papers. That's just a few of the macro level indicators of fabulous open access growth that I happened to notice over the past few weeks!Some highlights of 2011: this was the year to let the competition begin! and begin to address some of the challenges of success. PMC growth is now about one free fulltext per minute.
Following are a few figures for the year. To download the full data, go to the DGOA Dataverse
For earlier issues of The Dramatic Growth of Open Access and occasional updates, see the DGOA series post.
Just added to the dataverse: a first attempt at comparing % of free fulltext indexed in PubMed by research funder. The method involves searching PubMed for Research Support, N.I.H., Extramural [pt] OR Research Support, N.I.H., Intramural [pt], first with no date limiter, then 3 years, etc. Similar approaches were used with the search terms Research Support, Canadian Institutes of Health Research and Research Support, Wellcome Trust. Comments on the method are welcome, please send an email to hgmorris at sfu dot ca. I wonder if this search approach could be used to compare countries on their relative contributions to medical research in the future? CIHR's total contributions indexed (not just fulltext) were about 85% of what our contribution would be relative to NIH adjusted for population (Canada has about 1/10 the population of the U.S.). IF this method is sound, we're not quite pulling our weight when it comes to medical research in Canada, although we're not as far behind as I thought we might be.
Based on this method, it appears that Wellcome Trust is having the greatest success at compliance with its open access policy, having the highest percentage (62%) at the 3-year mark. Full data can be found in the DGOA Dataverse (Dec. 31, 2011 full data, 3rd tab).
| % of free fulltext by research funder and date of publication | |||||||
| any date | 3 yrs | 2 yrs | 1 yr | 180 days | 60 days | 30 days | |
| NIH | 56% | 59% | 49% | 20% | 14% | 9% | 8% |
| CIHR | 35% | 33% | 32% | 19% | 16% | 9% | 0% |
| Wellcome Trust | 47% | 62% | 59% | 49% | 39% | 33% | 17% |
The Directory of Open Access Journals now has over 7,000 titles, having added a net total of 1,436, for a growth rate of 4 titles per day. Even more remarkable is the growth rate in journals and articles searchable at article level. At growth rates of over 40% in the past year, this illustrates that DOAJ titles are growing in functionality as well as numbers.
| Directory of Open Access Journals | |||
| December 31, 2011 | 2011 growth (numeric) | 2011 growth (percentage) | |
| # journals | 7,372 | 1,436 | 24% |
| # journals searchable at article level | 3,527 | 1,033 | 41% |
| # articles searchable at article level | 721,271 | 230,860 | 47% |
Open J-Gate provides a listing and search service specific to English-language journals. Open J-Gate now has close to 10,000 journals, of which 6,500 are peer-reviewed. In 2011, Open J-Gate added titles at a rate of over 4 per day.
| Open J-Gate | |||
| December 31, 2011 | 2011 growth (numeric) | 2011 growth (percentage) | |
| # journals (total) | 9,710 | 1,605 | 20% |
| # peer-reviewed | 6,508 | 1,631 | 33% |
The Electronic Journals Library tracks free journals regardless of peer-reviewed / immediate open access status. Electronic Journals Library now has more than 32,000 journals, having added over 5,000 in 2011 at a rate of 15 titles per day
| Electronic Journals Library - # journals | ||
| December 31, 2011 | 2011 growth (numeric) | 2011 growth (percentage) |
| 32,384 | 5,354 | 20% |
There are now more than 2,100 repositories listed in the vetted OpenDOAR, which added new repositories at the rate of 1 per day in 2011. The Registry of Open Access Repositories added about 2 new repositories per day in 2011.
| # repositories | |||
| December 31, 2011 | 2011 growth (numeric) | 2011 growth (percentage) | |
| OpenDOAR | 2,164 | 347 | 19% |
| ROAR | 2,610 | 520 | 25% |
Kudos to the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine for a snazzy new search service for the more than 33 million items available through over 2,000 repositories. A BASE search looks at more than 8 million documents more than a year ago, for a growth rate of 21 thousand documents per day.
| BASE: Bielefeld Academic Search Engine http://www.base-search.net/ | |||
| December 31, 2011 | 2011 growth (numeric) | 2011 growth (percentage) | |
| # documents | 33,598,612 | 8,082,061 | 32% |
| # service providers | 2,072 | 345 | 20% |
Growth rates at four established disciplinary repositories, PubMedCentral, arXiv, RePEC, and E-LIS, ranged from 10-15% for 2011.
| December 31, 2011 | 2011 growth (numeric) | 2011 growth (percentage) | |
| PubMedCentral | 2,300,000 | 301,387 | 15% |
| arXiv | 725,963 | 76,570 | 12% |
| RePEC | 1,135,000 | 150,000 | 15% |
| E-LIS | 12,577 | 1,157 | 10% |
