This issue of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access is dedicated to the hard-working staff at the US PubMedCentral who have done so much to make open access happen and are now on furlough.These charts show the steady increase in numbers and percentages of articles funded by NIH that are freely available within 3 years of publication. Since 2008, the percentage has increased from 35% to 64%.
Aside from thanking the researchers, the reason that I have selected this as an issue to highlight is to point out that the U.S. government shutdown is a major concern for scholarship as a whole, not just open access scholarship. When the world's largest medical research funding agency is shut down, research funds do not flow. Equipment cannot be bought or research assistants hired. When the total quantity of research decreases, there will be less need for publication, whether toll or open access. For anyone with a genuine concern to advance knowledge, this should be the focus. This is incidentally intended to add to my critical comments on the Bohannon / Science article focusing on poor peer review at a few new journals. I argue that the fact that Science would choose this as a focus at this moment in time suggests a publisher out of touch with the realities of the research communities. If the U.S. government shutdown continues, I predict a drop in scholarly research outputs.
Highlights this quarter
The open access journals listed in DOAJ are growing significantly in number of journals and article searchable at article level. The number of journals searchable at the article level grew this quarter grew by 660 to a total of 5,597, a total of 7 new journals searchable per day. The number of articles searchable via DOAJ at article level is now 1.5 million, a growth of 386,000 this quarter. DOAJ now has a browse by publication charge feature which makes it easy to illustrate that about two-thirds of the journals listed in DOAJ do NOT charge article processing fees. Internet Archive continues to amaze, adding 10 billion webpages this quarter for a total of 357 billion webpages. The number of texts freely available through the Internet Archive is over 5 million, with half a million added this quarter.
Items of interest since June 30, 2013
- Times Higher Education article - Open access gains ground (based on EU Commission below)
- BASE hits the 50 million record mark!
- European Commission: Open access to research publications reaching 'tipping point'
- Cool stats about CanLII, Canada's legal scholarship open access initiative: http://www.nationalmagazine.ca/Blog/July-2013/15-things-you-didn-t-know-about-CanLII.aspx [Disclosure: the École des sciences de l'information / School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa is one of the sponsors of the CanLII Hackathon this September]
- SpringerPlus Journal (a new PLoS ONE clone) announced a milestone of over 1,000 articles (Comment - this tends to support my hypothesis of 2011 that open access has moved into an age of competition).
The numbers: September 30, 2013
Directory of Open Access Journals
9,944 journals. Growth this quarter: 185 journals (2 per day)
121 countries. Growth this quarter: 1 country.
5,597 journals searchable at article level. Growth this quarter: 660 journals (7 per day).
1,517,338 articles searchable at article level. Growth this quarter: 386,957 articles (over 4,000 per day). 34% growth this quarter.
New: browse by publication fee. This browse feature demonstrates that the vast majority of OA journals do not use article processing charges.
Data as of October 12, 2013:
- No article processing charge - 6,557 journals
- With article processing charge - 2,687 journals
- Conditional article processing charge - 498 journals
- No information re article processing charge - 199 journals
1,566 academic peer-reviewed books. Growth this quarter: 113 books
54 publishers. Growth this quarter: 5 publishers.
Electronic Journals Library
# of journals that can be read free of charge: 42,115 journals. Growth this quarter: 1,487 journals.
Highwire Press
# free fulltext articles: 2,288,352. Decrease of 31,907 articles.
total # of articles: 7,114,008. Decrease of 9,063 articles.
completely free sites: 84. Growth of 11 sites this quarter.
Sites with free back issues: 279. Growth of 1 this quarter.
OpenDOAR
# open access repositories: 2,452. Growth of 130 this quarter.
Registry of Open Access Repositories
# open access repositories: 3,511. Growth of 130 this quarter.
Bielefeld Academic Search Engine
# of documents: 50,063,294. Growth this quarter: 2,915,212.
# of content providers: 2,690. Growth this quarter: 83.
PubMedCentral
# of freely available items: 2.8 million (from PubMedCentral website)
journals actively participating in PMC: 1,647. Growth this quarter: 91 journals.
# journals in PMC with immediate free access: 1,133. Growth this quarter: 32 journals.
# journals with all articles open access: 996. Growth this quarter: 36 journals.
arXiv
878,022 documents. Growth this quarter: 22,640
Social Sciences Research Network
Full text papers: 414,100. Growth this quarter: 13,859
Open access mandate policies (ROARMAP)
Total: 415. Growth this quarter: 16
Internet archive
Webpages: 357 billion. Growth this quarter: 10 billion.
Moving images (movies): 1,396,202. Growth this quarter: 87,925
Live music archive (concerts): 120,782. Growth this quarter: 3,319
Audio (recordings): 1,724,574. Growth this quarter: 82,528
Texts: 5,104,988. Growth this quarter: 500,828
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series.
Rationale and method.
Full data edition.
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