Dramatic Growth of Open Access 2015 first quarter

Data for the first quarter of 2014 (the 11th year of publication of this series) are now available in the dataverse. Error note re Dec. 31, 2014 version: the number for Electronic Journals Library was copied incorrectly (total journals mistook for free full-text journals). Noted as an error in the current version, will result in under-reporting of growth of this initiative in the near future.

Highlights

OpenDOAR added 129 repositories for a total of 2,857. The Bielefeld Academic Search Engine added close to 3 million documents for a total of over 71 million documents. Another 7,690 authors joined the Social Sciences Research Network for a total of over 275,000 authors.

Internet Archive added 1.7 million texts for 7.8 million.

The Directory of Open Access Journals, in spite of vigorous weeding and re-organizing over the past year or so, is back to showing consistent strong growth, adding 254 titles this quarter for slightly under 3 titles per day. Over the past year, the growth in articles that can be retrieved through a DOAJ article-level search grew by over a quarter of a million articles for a total of over 1.8 million articles! 20 more publishers joined the Directory of Open Access Books - as of today, DOAB includes 100 publishers.  Highwire Press added 9 completely free sites this quarter. The number of journals with immediate free access in PubMedCentral increased by 43 to a total of 1,443.

Congratulations and thanks to all of the people and organizations working hard to make open access happen. This is a major step for every author signing up for a repository, every journal moving to immediate free. I wish I had the time to thank and celebrate each of your accomplishments individually.

This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.