Correction: DOAJ will soon surpass 2.5 million articles, not a quarter of a billion as originally reported.
Highlights
Open access continues to demonstrate robust growth on a global scale, in terms of works that are made available open access, ongoing growth in infrastructure (new repositories, journals, book publishers), strong growth for new initiatives such as SocArxiv, BioRxiv, the Directory of Open Access Books, SCOAP3, as well as ongoing strong growth in established services such as BASE, PubMed / PubMedCentral, Internet Archive (check out the new Collections including a Trump archive and FactChecker), DOAJ (almost 2.5 million articles searchable at the article level), RePEC and arXiv. Ongoing growth in infrastructure and OA policy give every reason to expect this growth to be ongoing.
Open Data Version
Morrison, Heather, 2014, "Dramatic Growth of Open Access", hdl:10864/10660, Scholars Portal Dataverse, V17, Details
This edition of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access highlights two of the new kids on the OA block - SocArxiv and BioRxiv, modeled on early OA success story arXiv, topping the quarterly growth by percentage with percentage growth of about 30% each! SocArxiv now has 1,200 documents and BioRxiv 12,800. Similarly, a relative newcomer, the Directory of Open Access Books, is in both first and second place for annual growth by percentage with 68% growth for OA books and 40% of OA publishers in the past year for a total of 8,172 open access books and 217 OA book publishers.
SCOAP3, a global initiative to transform high-energy physics publishing to open access, is showing remarkable growth, 39% in the last year and 8% in the last quarter for a total of 15,790 articles funded.
To celebrate the growth of all OA services two pictures are presented of the growth of the largest collective OA search engine that I am aware of. Together, the 5,000 content providers who contribute metadata to the Bielefeld Academic Search Engine (BASE) have made available over 112 million documents. Around 60% of these are open access, so the number of OA documents in the world can be said to be somewhere about 67 million. BASE also posts their own online statistics table and chart - check it out here. I wish I had the time to applaud and celebrate the growth of each and every OA service, but with 5,000 services contributing to BASE (and others that don't), if I worked on this 365 days a year I would have to cover 14 initiatives every day. So please feel free to help out by applauding and celebrating the services most relevant to you - the journals in your discipline, your institutional repository, the services you find most helpful to search.
Below you will find tables listing the top services by quarterly (5% or more) and annual growth (10% or more). For the full numbers download the open data version (link above). As usual Internet Archive is well represented, with 5 items in the list of the top 13 services by quarterly growth and the top 18 services by annual growth. Internet Archive also offers 2 intriguing new services under Collections - a Trump Archive with over a thousand videos and a Fact Checker collection with over 400 items, available at https://archive.org/details/tvhttps://archive.org/details/tv
Of course PubMed and PubMedCentral are up there in the growth charts, in this quarter for total number of items (5% quarterly growth) as well as what looks (to me) like hesitant new steps by a substantial number of journals, with a 26% increase in the number of contributing journals that provide some OA and a 14% increase in the number of journals that provide OA to selected articles. The number of journals providing immediate free access and/or all articles open access continues to increase, so this is clearly growth, not backsliding.
DOAJ is included in the top growth services with 14% growth in the number of articles searchable at article level. DOAJ now has over 2.49 million articles searchable at the article level and should soon surpass 2.5 million articles.
arXiv and RePEC are on the list for strong growth in articles, and ROARMAP for growth in OA policies.
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| Quarterly growth (percentage) | June 2017 | |
| 32% | SocArxiv preprints | 1,200 |
| 29% | BioRxiv all articles | 12,280 |
| 18% | # of academic peer-reviewed books (DOAB) | 8,172 |
| 18% | # publishers (DOAB) | 217 |
| 8% | SCOAP3 articles | 15,790 |
| 8% | Internet Archive Software | 178,635 |
| 7% | Video (movies) (Internet Archive) | 3,437,542 |
| 7% | Texts (Internet Archive) | 12,821,051 |
| 5% | Images (Internet Archive) | 1,476,743 |
| 5% | # of content providers (BASE) | 5,621 |
| 5% | Audio (recordings) (Internet Archive) | 3,477,033 |
| 5% | Webpages (Internet Archive) (in billions) | 298 |
| 5% | PubMedCentral (number of items) | 4,400,000 |
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| Annual growth (percentage) | 06/30/17 | |
| 68% | # of academic peer-reviewed books (DOAB) | 8,172 |
| 40% | # publishers (DOAB) | 217 |
| 39% | SCOAP3 number of archives | 15,790 |
| 34% | Video (movies) (Internet Archive) | 3,437,542 |
| 33% | Internet Archive: Software | 178,635 |
| 29% | # of content providers (BASE) | 5,621 |
| 27% | Texts (Internet Archive) | 12,821,051 |
| 26% | PMC journals some OA | 609 |
| 25% | Internet Archive: Images | 1,476,743 |
| 20% | # of documents (BASE) | 112,458,360 |
| 17% | Audio (recordings) (Internet Archive) | 3,477,033 |
| 17% | RePEc journal articles | 1,491,037 |
| 14% | # of articles searchable at article level (DOAJ) | 2,493,835 |
| 14% | PMC select deposit journals | 4,296 |
| 13% | RePEC downloadable | 2,143,844 |
| 13% | Total Policies (ROARMAP) | 872 |
| 13% | PMC # items | 4,400,000 |
| 10% | arXiv http://arxiv.org/ | 1,278,739 |
This post is part of the Dramatic Growth of Open Access Series
Feel free to copy and share - with love. Note that images are compressed by the software to reduce file size, and they are also quickly outdated. You are welcome to use the images, but my recommendation is to download the data and make your own graphics. It's easier than you think with tools like modern spreadsheet software.
