Thank you, open access movement! September 30, 2012 Dramatic Growth of Open Access

On this Canadian Thanksgiving weekend, this issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is dedicated to all of the many millions of people around the world who make open access happen - the scholars who take the time for the few keystrokes to deposit their work in an open access archive and/or publish in open access journals; the editors and peer reviewers of thousands of open access journals; the journals and publishers who make their works open access, whether immediately on publication or after a bit of a delay; and all of the librarians, repository managers, research funders and advocates around the world who constantly work for a future of open access to all of our scholarly knowledge - and apologies to anyone whose important work I may be omitting. 

Highlighted this month is the dramatic growth of OpenDOAR, more than doubling from just over 800 repositories in 2006 to over 2,200 in 2012, representing substantial and impressive growth of the necessary infrastructure for open access archives. 

PubMedCentral has grown considerably in the years since the introduction of the strong public access requirement policy of the NIH in 2008, but also in voluntary participation going far beyond the requirements of the policy. In the past 4 years, the number of journals providing immediate free access to article through PMC has almost tripled, from 375 journals in 2008 to 979 today.

The number of journals the Electronic Journals Library includes that can be read free-of-charge has more than doubled from 15,000 in 2007 to over 36,000 today. This collection includes both fully open access journals and a large and growing number of journals that make their works as freely available as they can, for example providing free access to back issues, commonly after a one-year embargo.

Popcorn, anyone? 

The most amazing growth this quarter - and a milestone since the end of September!: the Internet Archive's movie collection. 49% growth in the past quarter, and now just over a million free movies!

 RePEC has been dropped for this quarter as I cannot figure out how many documents / fulltext they have. RePEC features rich statistics, but the emphasis seems to have changed from content to usage - not very useful for tracking growth of OA.


 Selected numbers

Directory of Open Access Journals 

• 8,242 titles
• 330 titles added this quarter
• growth rate 3.6 titles / day

Directory of Open Access Books

•  1,215 books / 33 publishers
•  117 books / 6 publishers added this quarter
• growth rate 1 book / day

Electronic Journals Library

• 36,593 journals can be read free of charge
• 1,297 added this quarter
• growth rate 14 titles / day 

OpenDOAR

• 2,207 repositories
• 42 added this quarter
• growth rate 3.5 / day

Bielefeld Academic Search Engine

• 37 million documents
• 950,000 added this quarter
• growth rate 10 thousand / day

PubMedCentral

• 979 journals provide immediate free access
• 51 journals added this quarter for immediate free access
• growth rate 4 journals / week

arXiv

• 787,000 documents
• 20,000 documents added this quarter
• growth rate 200 documents / day

E-LIS

• 13,841 documents
• 454 added this quarter
• growth rate 5 documents / day

 Social Sciences Research Network

• 360,000 full text papers
• 12,000 added this quarter
• growth rate 130 full text papers / day

Internet Archive

• 997,158 movies
• 325,000 added this quarter
• growth rate 3,600 / day

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.  Full data can be downloaded from here. If you would like to re-use one of the charts, please contact me for a high-resolution version (for technical reasons).