Highlights
I've added a new metric for medical open access, a keyword search of PubMed for "cancer" for articles with no date limit, last 5 years, last 2 years, and last year, further limited to free fulltext to determine the percentage of items for which fulltext is available. This ranges from 26% overall (no date limit), to 40 - 44% for items published in the last 2 - 5 years, to 32% for articles published in the last year.Also added this quarter: OECD iLibrary - with more than 11,000 free books, this one publisher's OA collection is nearly double the size of the 167 publishers included in the impressivley growing Directory of Open Access Books! arXiv, in addition to an over 10% growth rate last year, inspired the recent development of two similar services, socArXiv and bioRxiv, newly added to facilitate future growth tracking. The DOAJ get-tough inclusion policy and March 2016 major weeding means the DOAJ count for titles, countries and journals searchable at the article level are all down from last year, while articles searchable at the article level through DOAJ continued to show robust growth of 13%. DOAJ's quarterly growth is back to an impressive rate of just under 3 titles per day. RePEC surpassed a milestone of 2 million downloadable items this year, while Internet Archive surpassed 3 milestones: there are now more than 3 million video and audio recordings, and more than 11 million texts (the number of IA web pages archived is way down, by the billions - such a difference it strikes me as likely due to a glitch in counting, whether before or after). Recently Open Journal Systems announced that OJS is now used by more than 10,000 active journals which <
Kudos and thanks to everyone in the open access movement - every researcher, author, editor, publisher, archive manager, librarian, policy-maker, and activist who is making open access happen. What of 2017? My advice: let's remember the beautiful vision of the potential unprecedented public good of open access - forged not at a time of peace and certainty, but rather within months of the trauma of 9/11 - repeated below - and keep on making it happen.
BOAI vision:
An old tradition and a new technology have converged to make possible an unprecedented public good. The old tradition is the willingness of scientists and scholars to publish the fruits of their research in scholarly journals without payment, for the sake of inquiry and knowledge. The new technology is the internet. The public good they make possible is the world-wide electronic distribution of the peer-reviewed journal literature and completely free and unrestricted access to it by all scientists, scholars, teachers, students, and other curious minds. Removing access barriers to this literature will accelerate research, enrich education, share the learning of the rich with the poor and the poor with the rich, make this literature as useful as it can be, and lay the foundation for uniting humanity in a common intellectual conversation and quest for knowledge.
Selected numbers and growth by service:
Directory of Open Access Journals
Highlights: in March 2016 DOAJ removed more than 3,000 journals, reflecting a new get-tough inclusion policy. All journals that had not gone through DOAJ's new application process were removed. As a result, in spite of robust quarter since the removal process, most of DOAJ's key data are lower at the end of 2016 than at 2015, with the exception of number of articles searchable through DOAJ which grew by 13%.
- 9,455 journals (down from 10,963 in 2015, a 14% decrease. Note that this quarter DOAJ added 246 journals for a current growth rate of close to 3 titles per day).
- 6,634 journals searchable at article level (down from 6,780 in 2015, a 2% decrease. Note that this quarter DOAJ increased the number of searchable journals by 217).
- 2,400,258 articles (up 13% from 2,123,402 at the end of 2015, very impressive given the journal weeding process)
- 128 countries (down from 136 at the end of 2016)
- 55,562 journals that can be read free-of-charge (up from 51,983 at the end of 2017, a 7% growth rate)
- 11,050 e-book titles
- 5,130 multilingual summaries
- 5,200 working papers
- 5 billion data points across 42 databases
- 5,602 books (up from 3,789 at the end of 2015, a 48% growth rate)
- 167 publishers (up from 134 at the end of 2014, 33 publishers added, a 25% growth rate)
3,000 repository milestone!!!
- 3,285 repositories (up from 2,991 at the end of 2015, a 10% growth rate)
- 4,365 repositories (up from 4,147 at the end of 2015, a 5% growth rate)
100 million document milestone!!!
5,000 content providers milestone!!!
- 103,090,961 documents (up from 84.25 million at the end of 2015, a 22% growth rate)
- 5,023 content sources (up from 3,965 at the end of 2015, a 27% growth rate)
4 million article milestone!!!
- 4.1 million articles (up from 3.7 million at the end of 2015, an 11% growth rate)
- 2,326 journals actively participating in PubMedCentral (up from 2,021 at the end of 2015, a 10% growth rate)
- 1,720 journals with immediate free access (up from 1,553 at the end of 2015, an 11% growth rate)
- 1,426 journals with all articles open access (up from 1,331 at the end of 2015, a 7% growth rate)
- 569 journals with some articles open access (up from 423 at the end of 2015, a 35% growth rate)
- 1,219,224 preprints (up from 1,105,906 at the end of 2015, a 10% growth rate)
- 631 searchable preprints
bioRxiv
(in beta December 31, 2016, inspired by arXiv) ***
- 7,500 articles (based on "all articles" search, 750 pages X 10 articles / page)
2 million downloadable items milestone!!!
- 2,021,534 downloadable items (up from 1,942,541 at the end of 2015, a 13% growth rate)
- 803 total open access mandate policies (up from 762 at the end of 2015, a 5% growth rate)
3 million milestones for video and audiorecordings!!!
10 million milestone for texts (now 11 million)!!!
- 11 million texts (up from 8.8 million at the end of 2015, a 26% growth rate
* OECD iLibrary statement on free-to-read (from About page):
All book and journal content is available to all users to read online by clicking the READ icon. Read editions are optimised for browser-enabled mobile devices and can be read online wherever there is an internet connection - desktop computer, tablets or smart phones. They are also shareable and embeddable.** about SocArXiv (from the Dec. 7, 2016 launch announcement):
The site also features content for all users to access and download such as the OECD Factbook, OECD Working Papers, Indicators, and more.
Subscribers benefit from full access to all content in all available formats.
SocArXiv, the open access, open source archive of social science, is officially launching in beta version today. Created in partnership with the Center for Open Science, SocArXiv provides a free, noncommercial service for rapid sharing of academic papers; it is built on the Open Science Framework, a platform for researchers to upload data and code as well as research results*** about bioRxiv (from about page):
bioRxiv (pronounced "bio-archive") is a free online archive and distribution service for unpublished preprints in the life sciences. It is operated by Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory, a not-for-profit research and educational institution. By posting preprints on bioRxiv, authors are able to make their findings immediately available to the scientific community and receive feedback on draft manuscripts before they are submitted to journals.This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access series.
