The impact of funding agency open access policies (March 31, 2012 Dramatic Growth of Open Access)

This post highlights a few bits of data suggesting the impact of selected funding agencies' open access mandate policies. We're definitely making some progress! By my method of calculation, compliance with the NIH Public Access Policy stands at 73%.  On the other hand, there is still room for improvement - for example, how is it possible that more than a quarter of NIH funded authors have yet to comply with a requirement of their research grants? SURF has just posted a report showing that open access provision rates in the Netherlands are stagnating.

This chart suggests that the N.I.H. Public Access policy may be having a transformative effect beyond the works that authors actually are required to make publicly accessible. Since the N.I.H. policy came into effect, the number of journals voluntarily making all of their articles freely available immediately has nearly tripled, from 321 in March 2008 to 897 today. In the first quarter of 2012, the number of journals actively participating in PMC grew by 58; 56 more journals began making their articles freely available immediately; and 44 more journals made all articles open access.

This chart shows the difference in availability of free full-text for PubMed articles within 6 months of publication, by funding support. There is no difference between N.I.H. Extramural researchers and all articles in PubMed; in both cases, 13% of items in PubMed lead to free full-text. CIHR funded researchers are only 1% better, in spite of the CIHR Policy on Access to Research Outputs requiring open access within 6 months of publication. Even N.I.H.'s own intramural researchers have a record of fast free access that is only slightly higher than the overall rate. Only the Wellcome Trust has a noticeably higher track record, with 39% of works connecting with free full text. Since CIHR and Wellcome Trust have policies with the same permitted embargo (6 months), the threefold difference in results likely comes from a source other than the policy per se, such as the assertive implementation of the policy Wellcome Trust is known for.

Noteworthy this quarter:  the beginning of 2012 has definitely been dramatic, with the Research Works Act proposed in the U.S. and subsequently dropped, a remarkable turnaround. This came after Elsevier dropped its support for RWA, thanks to the still growing Elsevier boycott, with over 8,900 signatories.  This pushback was likely inspired by the highly successful protests against SOPA and PIPA, particularly the January 18, 2012 Internet Blackout.  Peter Suber wrote about RWA and the recently re-introduced Federal Research Public Access Act (FRPAA) in the March 2012 SPARC Open Access Newsletter. The Research Councils UK, an early leader in open access policy, is moving to the next level with a consultation underway on their draft new open access policy - my comments can be found here.

Growth this quarter (selected)

Open access journals

DOAJ: 7,607 journals. Up by 235 this quarter, a growth rate of 2.6 titles per day (a lower growth rate than the average for the past year of 4 titles per day). 

Electronic Journals Library:  33,984 free journals, an increase of 1,600 this quarter (growth rate 18 titles per day). 

DOAJ searchable articles increased by 62,831. Highwire added 17,226 free articles, about 17% of the total of 97,017 articles added by Highwire in total.

Open access archives

OpenDOAR added 22 repositories, for a total of 2,186.
The Registry of Open Access Repositories added 124 repositories, for a total of 2,734.

A Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) search encompassed close to 7 hundred thousand more documents, for a total of over 34 million documents.

arXiv added 20,000 documents for a total of 745,000.

RePEC has changed their statistics approach this quarter; to obtain numbers, I had to go to the LogEC site, download (messy) and calculate a total of 31,466 downloadable fulltext, for a total of over a million.

The Social Sciences Research Network (SSRN) added over 16,000 papers, for a total of close to 400,000 papers.

The number of Open Journal Systems installations hit 11,500 sometime last December.

The Internet Archive now makes freely available more than 600,000 moving images, 100,000 concerts, 1.2 million audio recordings, and 3.3 million texts. 

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.To download the data see google docs for the current full data version and the current show growth version.  The Dramatic Growth of Open Access dataverse is the place to look for archived data versions.

Housekeeping: if anyone would like to use the charts from this post, I recommend getting in touch with me -  for technical not permissions reasons.