Wednesday, December 11, 2013

The unstoppable growth of high quality open access resources (December 2013 early year-end edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access)


As shown in this chart (thanks to César Villamizar), the number of articles indexed in PubMed for which free fulltext is available within 3 years of publication is now over 800,000, or 28% of the articles indexed.  This growth is an important indication of the dramatic growth of high quality open access resources. The U.S. National Institutes of Health, responsible for the PubMed index, does not index junk!

Recently Peter Gruss, President of the Max Planck Society wrote about the unstoppable rise of open access. The 2013 early year-end edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access confirms this unstoppable rise, featuring a number of notable areas of growth and important milestones, with a focus on numbers that are indicators of growth of high quality open access resources.

Congratulations are due to the Public Library of Science as recently PLoS celebrated a milestone of its 100,000th article. The number of journals actively participating in PubMedCentral continues to rise. In the past year, the number of journals actively participating in PMC increased by 215 - about one title per working day. There are now more than 1,000 journals in PMC with all articles open access.

The number of research funding agencies and institutions with open access mandates continues to rise. 12 more institutional open access mandates have been added to ROARMAP since September 30th! Mandates by funding agencies and prestigious research institutions and universities ensure that the growth of open access features high quality articles, due to the vetting processes involved in assessing funding grant requests and institutional hiring, tenure and promotion practices. 

Congratulations to the Directory of Open Access Journals for passing another very recent milestone of 10 thousand titles!  Due to continuous improvement DOAJ was deleting as many titles as it was adding earlier this year - for this reason, the growth in DOAJ reflects not only quantity but quality as poorer journals have been weeded. Dramatic as the growth of open access has been to date, it looks like we can count on a ramping up of growth in 2014, when the first discipline-wide transition to open access, in particle physics, is implemented as SCOAP3 is set to begin January 1, 2014. 

Internet Archive continues to amaze, having added 1.8 million texts this past year for a total of more than 5 million texts!

A special thank you to César Villamizar, a student in our School of Information Studies and research assistant, for help with this issue's data and charts - and a well-deserved Happy Holidays and New Year to everyone in the open access movement!

The full data and chart are available to download from uO recherche. This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.

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